this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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[โ€“] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)
[โ€“] tal@lemmy.today 4 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

One of the mechanisms for compressing memory in Linux. Trades CPU time for effectively having more RAM Recent versions of Fedora apparently have it on by default.

I've read that zswap, another mechanism, is preferable on newer systems with NVMe/SSD, where paging isn't as painful; that only compresses pages going to swap, but requires that you actually have some swap. I haven't used either.

Probably someone should try benchmarking them for various workloads if systems are going to be running on much less memory for a while. Was more of an edge case thing that not many people cared about, but if operating with less memory is suddenly more important, might have broader interest.

On Linux, also possible to opt for lighter-on-memory versions of a lot of software that you're kinda committing to using the Microsoft-provided version of on Windows. File browser, compositor, etc.