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I’ve heard this position multiple times, and yet every single benchmark I’ve seen repeated by teams of engineers in multiple contexts fails to replicate this fear. Zswap really is something that should just always be enabled.

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For me it solved most of these lockups when using heavy ram apps (Electron, Firefox + Teams, etc) and keeps the system responsive. I am happy with it and plan to keep it enabled. I have no data to validate except that I don't remember having to SysRq key + F some app for a long time.

How would you benchmark that?

For example, at Oculus they ran both performance benchmarks in a lab and collected feedback data from field telemetry. Now of course, it’s always possible some performance counter was overlooked / the degradation requires a specific workload to show, but the lack of ability to show any evidence of a difference implies that you probably are unlikely to see it given that the detractors were very vocal and engineering at big corps tends to be more stasis driven.

I saw this also repeated at Apple (not Zswap since not Linux, but similar idea of compressing pages) and Android.

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