# zswap

31 Hacker News commenters recommended zswap and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Compresses pages going to swap in RAM, cutting disk reads and writes; many people prefer it to zram and use it on low-RAM machines.

## Why people recommend it

- Preferred over zram (6 comments): "Zswap has improved to the point where it is now preferable over Zram." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49669307)) "The main point is to use zswap over swap plus zram." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48970699)) "Zswap is better than ZRAM for this use case." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48958590))
- Cuts disk reads and writes (3 comments): "This compresses everything going to swap, and decompresses it coming back: less disk reads and writes, and less space used." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46719785)) "You should consider some sort of swap on ram like zswap rather than thrashing your nvme." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46712057)) "having disk swap can actually decrease disk I/O" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501782))
- Dynamically sized compressed pool (3 comments): "zswap is dynamically managed by the kernel and zswap sends out compressed pages to swap" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698390)) "it's not a fixed RAM storage, it merely compresses pages in RAM up to a variable limit" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286519)) "It confers most of the benefits of zram swap, plus being able to evict to non-RAM" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46372586))
- Avoids freezing under memory pressure (3 comments): "solves a lot of the issues with freezing under memory pressure" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49655816)) "Current zswap+oomd behavior is the best choice imho." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48349266)) "Zswap is supposed to degrade more gracefully." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47828746))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [zram](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zram.md): 31 recommend
- [MGLRU](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mglru.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "zswap", https://hackerapproved.com/p/zswap/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).