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I read the swap wiki, but I'm still not sure whether this would be an improvement or wasted space degradation. I have 32GB of ram and zswap activated, 4GB.
When I use memory intensive programs like Siril that has 90% memory allocated, during certain operations, kernel kills Siril to free up the ram for the system.
Would the regular swap partition prevent that? And if yes, would that be my best option here?
I could lower the memory usage of Siril, from 0.90 to, say 0.80 or even lower. I'm kind of reluctant to do so, as I need every possible leverage of speed that I can get, as some processes are very long. Still, I'm not sure whether swap would make this for the better.
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zswap is enabled by default I believe, do you mean zram?
If you do mean zswap, then yes it will help, but you'll need to actually create a swap partition or file. zswap can compress the data that is put into the swap file, but it needs a swap file/partition to put that data into.
If you mean you want to use zram, then you actually want to disable zswap via the kernel parameter: zswap.enabled=0 and no swap partition or file is required. This will also give you more effective memory capacity, but how much depends on how 'compressible' the data is, and it's obviously still all in your RAM. With 32GB, this can be a reasonable setup for a desktop PC in most use cases.
I personally use zram and have never had an out-of-memory situation. At one point (this is not common for me) I was consuming 36GB of memory with only 32GB of physical memory and no real swap space. Most of the time it's barely used.
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Thanks. Yeah I have a zswap 4gb, not zram.
So now my option is - zram or regular swap? I'm not sure how much of the data Siril uses is compressible for zram? That's the real question. Because, zswap would probably be more than enough for everything else - except Siril.
Update: I read some articles and it appears that zswap + swap is a better choice for this.
Last edited by maboleth (2026-08-20 09:23:46)
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