114
New Patches For Linux's Zswap Show Major Improvements
(www.phoronix.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2026
114 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
15192 readers
227 users here now
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Yeah, there is a lot to it. Firstly, if you have loads of ram, and don't really use it, then discussing swap is pointless, just don't have a swap device. If ram on your system is marginal for your workload, then swap is a must have as your system will gain performance by being able to swap, even if it is to an SSD. In that case your system will start swapping to ssd as it gets closer to being full. Zswap improves this by using the margin the system has in ram at which it would swap, to compress the pages in ram instead. So you don't lose any usable ram with zswap. But you gain performance as compressing the pages in ram is faster than writing them to SSD. But it does eat some CPU load in doing this.
Ah, okay. I get it, I think. You're still using the same amount of RAM but you're spending some CPU cycles compressing its contents to make more room.
Can you combine zswap with regular swap, like a swap device or swap file?
Zswap always(?) uses a swap file or disk partition. It does a smart job using both compressed memory and disk space as swap
zRam does not use disk. Do not attempt combining zRam with any kind of swap on disk, it's a horrible combination
Oh okay, so zswap actually requires a swap file or device? Or just uses it if available?
I think it might require it, but I've never tried it without.
Thanks for all your info, friend. I appreciate it.