Please, for the love of who ever you hold in high esteem, use swap. See: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
Now I don’t really like the whole “Heres an article from some rando to prove my point” thing, but anecdotally, the article does line up with my experience (with 32 gigs of system memory). Namely, when I went without swap I experienced frequent system lock-ups, when I added swap on zram, lock ups still happened but less frequently, and when I eventually changed swap on zram to disk swap on the recommendation of this article lock ups never happened again.
To add some nuance to this, do not use ZRAM in combination with swap. There’s ZSWAP for that which does what you would expect, without clogging up your RAM and gracefully handling a backing device. (ZRAM is just another block device for the kernel, so you will get LRU inversion if it fills up and you have another layer of swap on disk. Meaning your cold pages will be in needlessly stuck zram.)
Please, for the love of who ever you hold in high esteem, use swap. See: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html Now I don’t really like the whole “Heres an article from some rando to prove my point” thing, but anecdotally, the article does line up with my experience (with 32 gigs of system memory). Namely, when I went without swap I experienced frequent system lock-ups, when I added swap on zram, lock ups still happened but less frequently, and when I eventually changed swap on zram to disk swap on the recommendation of this article lock ups never happened again.
Use Swap FILE though… Not Swap Partition
To add some nuance to this, do not use ZRAM in combination with swap. There’s ZSWAP for that which does what you would expect, without clogging up your RAM and gracefully handling a backing device. (ZRAM is just another block device for the kernel, so you will get LRU inversion if it fills up and you have another layer of swap on disk. Meaning your cold pages will be in needlessly stuck zram.)
Yeah, the same person who wrote the article I linked above also wrote one on zram vs zswap, which I think is also a good read: https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-what.html