Enable and use zRAM instead for swap

There are a couple aspects to this that need to be explored.

For one, there’s zram and zswap. zram is fully ephemeral - no data in RAM ever touches the disk in any form, encrypted or otherwise. This helps reduce disk wear-and-tear, and could be theoretically useful from a security standpoint. However, it does mean that systems with lower RAM can only get so much out of zram - the amount of stuff you can have in RAM increases, but there’s an upper limit that depends on what kind of data you’re working on.

zswap on the other hand is basically zram and a swapfile combined. Data is compressed in RAM first, and then infrequently used data is swapped out to disk. This gives you speed benefits, and it lets you fit more stuff in your RAM than normal while also allowing you to have the “virtually infinite memory” capabilities of a normal swapfile. However, it’s a bit trickier to configure, and it does end up with memory contents written to disk which could be bad from a security standpoint (though I think swap-file-creator is encrypting the swapfile).

I personally prefer zram on my systems, however for VMs with only 2 or 3 GB RAM zswap might be more practical. swap-file-creator might be a good place to configure this?

2 Likes