

Yeah, I’m still tweaking things and just kindof came to the same conclusion I need to bump it up.
I was assuming that it thick-allocated the RAM for the compressed swap block device, but it seems to be dynamic now that I’ve read deeper into it. I just bumped it from 50% to 350% (basically one extreme to another).
I’m wondering the same. I haven’t read anything authoritative, but it definitely seems like it only consumes the RAM it’s using. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be able to create block devices that exceed the physical memory. I started to wonder when I had it set to 50% (4 GB) and gave it a stress test. The 4 GB it allocated filled up but was compressed to just about 1 GB, so I thought “surely this isn’t wasting 3 GB of RAM to hold 1 GB of pages.”
The guidelines I’ve read seem like there’s some guesswork involved in the planning. Basically you can make the zram device as large as you want so long as the compressed data is less than the physical RAM (not all pages compress equally as you mentioned).
I’ve since bumped it to 200% of system ram (16 GB), and I think that’s probably good enough for my use cases. I’m seeing about a 4:1 average compress ratio, so I could go higher, but 8 GB has been plenty usable up until now. :shrug: I also left the original swap file in place with a lower priority as a spillover (I’m not really missing the 4 GB of disk space that uses, so might as well keep it).