zswap and zram are fundamentally different approaches with different philosophies. If in doubt, use zswap.
  • Lemmchen@feddit.orgEnglish
    3 months

    So, is the TL;DR “Don’t use zram. Use zswap only when you want to use swap.”?

    • Björn@swg-empire.de
      3 months

      More or less.

      • Zswap is better than zram because it’s integrated with the kernel. Swap in zram is more of a hack.
      • zram can kill your file cache unnecessarily, which leads to more disk reads.
      • Don’t use zram without an oom killer.
      • They’re working on zswap to not require any disk swap at all, basically killing the last reason why one might want to use zram over zswap.
    • Björn@swg-empire.de
      3 months

      He addresses that later under the title “zram on Fedora”.

      Basically because Fedora wants to eliminate disk swap entirely. They have systemd-oomd configured to mitigate the downsides.

      • Cris_Citrus@piefed.zipEnglish
        3 months

        I… I think that might not be working on my install… I keep getting out of memory crashes that hang my laptop and I’m not really technical enough to solve it so I’ve just been living with it until I reinstall and try to set everything back up, or distro hop again

        I wonder if I configured something wrong at install or broke it at some point tinkering…