Sorry, I cannot follow you.

There is no reason at all, to not have physical swap when using ZRAM. My physical swap just has a lower priority and is never used, when using ZRAM.

You claim that there is no performance difference, once you have >= 8 GB of RAM. I would assume it is much relevant what kind of usage is thrown at ZSWAP/ZRAM instead of the size. Perhaps you could elaborate, why, in your opinion one will not observe a difference in performance and why this limit would be exactly 8GB? I also use ZRAM on my 8GB machines, with a physical swap partition as backup and physical swap is never touched.

OOM killer is IMHO independent of ZSWAP/ZRAM, because swap space has an upper limit anyway, and a functioning OOM killer is IMHO preferable to a crashed system. I was just surprised, that the OOM killer did not work for me, when using ZSWAP, because IMHO it should have killed the browser in my example.

Finally, why do you claim that ZRAM performs better on low-memory devices, because I do not see a reason that it should, or that such a generic answer makes sense.

Please understand my intention here: I want to understand WHY you make these statements and what is the technical reasoning behind them.

Sorry, my English is not good enough.

ZSWAP basically crashed. The computer had no stutters, it stopped working at all. It did not really feel slower with ZSWAP vs. ZRAM.

I used the same computer with exactly the same desktop/browser configuration, so it should be a 'fair' comparison between ZSWAP/ZRAM.

I also have to add, I am using ZRAM on high memory devices, too, w/o any trouble. ZRAM should IMHO even perform better, when you have more memory, because the RAM disk can be bigger and hold more data.

Excellent point! The whole point about 'LRU inversion' falls apart, if the data never leaves ZRAM in the first place.

Yeah, seams like it!

Thank you for the warning!

I am not sure I used 'freezing' in the correct way, my machine has a full (I guess) out of memory crash. Since the physical swap runs full, I assume i/o should be ok. Sometimes I also install games from GOG on this machine, which is heavy read/write i/o, so again, I guess that i/o is not the problem here.

Thanks a lot for sharing. I am happy, it is not just me.

Fedora uses ZRAM w/o swap by default since a few years AFAIK. ZRAM is to the best of my knowledge also heavily used in Android phones w/o swap and of course Chromebooks w/o swap.

For me, swap is never used when ZRAM is activated, I will probably not setup a partition for new installations of Debian.

I still do not get, why it seems that people like Chris Down are so strong in their recommendation for ZSWAP. Chris seems to work at META and probably sees primary server workloads. But I would expect a developer of his caliber to be able to understand and formulate, where ZRAM beats ZSWAP and the other way around. Even in his article above, he is a little bit more nuanced concerning his recommendations. My personal takeaway for now is, to use ZRAM on desktops unless I really need/want hibernation.

Thank you very much for the links. I already know the information there, I'll update my question.

At the moment, I am trying to clear ascension 20.

My chance of winning the game up to ascension 5 is > 50%.

IMHO StS gives the player bad habits in the lower difficulties (and the difficult spike when reaching the heart is not that great).

Some tips stolen from better players than me:

• You really have to play optimal and think about every card to minimize life loss (This could also mean taking a hit early and kill off an enemy faster vs. blocking an early hit and taking massive damage later.)
• The bosses especially can be seen as problem to solve. Look ahead, do you have the right card(s) in the deck to solve the problem?
• The first hall is mostly about about up front damage, in the second you will need some area of effect damage etc.
• Before adding a card to your deck, answer the following questions:
  • How high is the chance I can even play this card? (Example: You have 3 energy and a card costs 2 Energy. If you have another 2 Energy card, you know increase your chance of a dead draw, because you can not play both if they appear in the same hand)
  • Does this card has any synergy with the cards I already have in my deck or with any artifacts?
  • Does this card solve a problem (e.g. boss or enemy) I have? IMHO all the generic advice is not wrong (like having as little cards as is possible), but the point about playing the higher ascensions is really more seeing 'the whole' instead of focusing on one aspect. For example, if you have Corruption in a bottle and Dark Embrace, all of a sudden you want to have as many skills a possible... OTOH, if you have two Dropkicks, you want everything which destroys cards to have an endless Dropkick-Engine as soon as possible.
• Take care of immediate problems you know you will face (like the boss of the current hall), instead of speculating on card combinations which might or might not show up in the future. (Exception to the speculation rule: Iron Clad has Limit Break, and it is total reasonable to expect to find some strength boost as an Iron Clad, so LimitBreak is usually the one card which I never think about picking up)

tldr: Picking your strategy and adding/removing of cards must be seen in the context of artifacts, energy and the bosses you will see. Optimize for your next known problem, instead of betting in cards to become available. You can have 1-2 cards for special situations or as speculation, but adding for example another attack card if you already have enough of attack, simply doesn't solve a problem or makes your deck stronger.

Yes, I didn't thing too much about food/calories in the past, so when I read about the connection it is in hindsight obvious, but I didn't get the idea by myself.

Thanks a lot! Great write up, and the energy-stored view of calories makes a lot of sense and is very intuitive!

Thank you for your answer!

Thanks a lot! To the point and on an abstraction level that is very clear!