Hey, Fedora users with laptops with 8GB of RAM — I’m curious if our new compressed-ram default is helping you. After you have been running for a long time and have lots of browser tabs open and other apps running (like normal daily use for several days), can you please run
/sbin/zramctl
and post the results? Thanks!
If you’re running something other than GNOME, note that too please.
I’d say yes if your swap is on SSD. By being compressed, it makes it that less data gets written to disk seeing that the first part of swap that is “written” to is into the zram. Until that gets filled, it’ll get written to the SSD.
So, to answer your question, both my machines running Fedora has 16GB of RAM, both have 17GB of swap, and 4 GB of zram that makes it to 21GB of swap.
What I’m specifically interested in is how much use it’s actually getting, and if there is size or other tuning we could adjust for the default.
On my 16gb system I rarely see more than a few k compressed, so I want to see more people’s experiences.
I use the default values. I never put much thought on it.
This is from my VM with 4GB of RAM, I use it for some light GUI work (gnome, firefox, terminal):
$ zramctl
NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 lzo-rle 1.9G 345.7M 105.9M 111.3M 4 [SWAP]
Not having disk swap in a VM helps a lot 
On my system with the following spec’s
Memory: 7.8GiB
I get this from zramctl
/dev/zram0 lzo-rle 3.9G 4K 74B 12K 6 [SWAP]
I never really notice it to be honest. Not actually using the desktop much right now, so I can check it when I’m loading it up more, see if there is much of a difference in the numbers.
And with the usual (at this time) apps open and being used this is the difference.
/dev/zram0 lzo-rle 3.9G 6.9M 988.3K 1.4M 6 [SWAP]
Still lots of room there.
16GB X1 Carbon?
16GB RAM, Fedora 33, i3 environment. Not what you asked for, but I seem to use the compression features a bit more than you have. I notice it most when Zoom, Slack, and other Electron-based apps get going. 
NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 lzo-rle 4G 1G 282.2M 299.9M 8 [SWAP]
A lenovo ideapad ryzen7-2700u laptop with 8GB of ram ( in reality 6,9 because some is shared with the graphics) with gnome, firefox, a document open, jupiter steam discord geary dejadup and a vm on backgroud, never have limitation because of the ram
/sbin/zramctl
NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 lzo-rle 3,4G 3,2G 1,2G 1,2G 8 [SWAP]
If I have only gnome and a terminal I get:
/sbin/zramctl
NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 lzo-rle 3,4G 489,6M 176,3M 365,5M 8 [SWAP]Thanks everyone! Next thing: if you found your zram swap to be heavily used, can you follow the steps here to increase the limit (as planned for F34) to see what effect that has?
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Scale_ZRAM_to_full_memory_size#How_To_Test
On my wife’s 8GB ThinkPad (soldered, cannot be expanded), I had to bump up the zram.
$ /sbin/zramctl
NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 lzo-rle 8G 2.7G 822.9M 857.3M 4 [SWAP]