Recently I read about how Fedora will be enabling 'swap on zram', including for upgraded machines, in a future version of Fedora. I suspect that a similar change may some day come to Ubuntu as well, because it's an attractive feature from some perspectives. My feelings are a bit more mixed.

Zram is a dynamically sized compressed block device in RAM (ie a compressed ramdisk); 'swap on zram' is using a zram device as a swap device (or as your sole swap device). This effectively turns inactive RAM pages into compressed RAM in an indirect way while pacifying the kernel's traditional desire to have some swap space. The pitch for swap on zram is very nicely summarized on the Fedora page as 'swap is useful, except when it's slow'. Being in RAM, swap on zram is very fast; it's the fastest swap device you can have, faster than SSD or even NVMe.

(This implies that how much of an advantage swap on zram is for your system depends partly on how fast your existing swap storage is. But RAM is still much faster than even NVMe.)

The drawback of swap on zram is that it is not really freeing up all of your memory to 'swap things out'; instead the estimate is that it will generally compress to about half the previous size. This drawback is the source of my mixed feelings about swap on zram for my Fedora desktops and our Ubuntu servers.

On my Fedora desktops, I generally barely use any swap space, which means that swap on zram would be harmless. If I do temporarily use a surge of swap space, being able to get the contents back fast is probably good; Linux has generally had an irritating tendency to swap out things I wanted, like bits of my window manager's processes. Both my home machine and my work machine have 32 GB of RAM, and peak swap usage over the past 120 days has been under a gigabyte, so I'm barely going to notice the memory effects. As a result I'm likely to leave swap on zram in its default enabled state when Fedora gives it to me.

Unfortunately this is not the case for our Ubuntu LTS servers. Those of our Ubuntu servers that use much swap at all tend to eventually end up with their swap space full or mostly full of completely idle data that just sits there. Keeping even a compressed version of this data in RAM is not what we want; we really want it to be swapped out of memory entirely. Swap on zram would be a loss of RAM for us on our Ubuntu servers. As a result, if and when Ubuntu enables this by default, I expect us to turn it off again.

One way to put this is that swap on zram is faster than conventional swap but not as useful and effective for clearing RAM. Which of these is more important is not absolute but depends on your situation. If you're actively swapping, then speed matters (fast swap lowers the chances of swapping yourself to death). If you're instead pushing out idle or outright dormant memory in order to make room for more productive uses of that RAM, then clearing RAM matters most.