zswap won't compress pages until they're swapped to disk, so essentially only once you've run out of memory to use and have begun experiencing the horrid performance degradation that comes from swapping to disk. you can use zram instead and put swappiness to a high value so the kernel aggressively swaps pages to the fake swap device made by zram, but then you lose the ability to have on-disk compressed swap pages.
i'm surprised that more work hasn't been done to fix this because memory management on linux is clearly lagging behind and affects a lot more than the minority of people using desktop linux systems, every android phone ships with 1.5x-2x more RAM than the equivalent iphone and performs worse when a bunch of apps are running in the background because of the poor memory management.
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zswap won't compress pages until they're swapped to disk, so essentially only once you've run out of memory to use and have begun experiencing the horrid performance degradation that comes from swapping to disk. you can use zram instead and put swappiness to a high value so the kernel aggressively swaps pages to the fake swap device made by zram, but then you lose the ability to have on-disk compressed swap pages.
i'm surprised that more work hasn't been done to fix this because memory management on linux is clearly lagging behind and affects a lot more than the minority of people using desktop linux systems, every android phone ships with 1.5x-2x more RAM than the equivalent iphone and performs worse when a bunch of apps are running in the background because of the poor memory management.