From my understanding, it’s the opposite. Zswap is the better one since it has a ZRAM-like compressed section of RAM and disk-backed swap. That’s definitely an oversimplification though.
I agree it’s confusing. I always look it up during setup so I know which one to use.
There is a lengthy thread on Reddit about the technical differences. Apparently Zswap will take advantage of the kernel eviction strategy for swap space. Apparently Zram doesn’t have that. To me that never made sense because, you create a Zram block device and then set that as your storage for swap space. Why would the kernel care, or know, that the swap space is backed by a Zram block device.
I do use Zram for my cloud self hosting machines and my dev machine. On the cloud devices they have 1 or 2 GB of ram and on my dev machine I have 32GB of ram. And in both cases it definitely seems like there is swap eviction. I also set the vm.swappiness to 180. Prior to Zram I would set my machines’ swappiness to 10. Swapping is highly encouraged on my machine.
From my understanding, it’s the opposite. Zswap is the better one since it has a ZRAM-like compressed section of RAM and disk-backed swap. That’s definitely an oversimplification though.
I agree it’s confusing. I always look it up during setup so I know which one to use.
There is a lengthy thread on Reddit about the technical differences. Apparently Zswap will take advantage of the kernel eviction strategy for swap space. Apparently Zram doesn’t have that. To me that never made sense because, you create a Zram block device and then set that as your storage for swap space. Why would the kernel care, or know, that the swap space is backed by a Zram block device.
I do use Zram for my cloud self hosting machines and my dev machine. On the cloud devices they have 1 or 2 GB of ram and on my dev machine I have 32GB of ram. And in both cases it definitely seems like there is swap eviction. I also set the vm.swappiness to 180. Prior to Zram I would set my machines’ swappiness to 10. Swapping is highly encouraged on my machine.