I used to put swap on zram when my laptop had one of those early ssds, that people would tell you not to put swap on for fear of wearing them out

Setup was tedious

User here, who also acts as a Level 2 support for storage.

The article contains some solid logic plus an assumption that I disagree with.

Solid logic: you should prefer zswap if you have a device that can be used for swap.

Solid logic: zram + other swap = bad due to LRU inversion (zram becomes a dead weight in memory).

Advice that matches my observations: zram works best when paired with a user-space OOM killer.

Bold assumption: everybody who has an SSD has a device that can be used for swap.

The assumption is simply false, and not due to the "SSD wear" argument. Many consumer SSDs, especially DRAMless ones (e.g., Apacer AS350 1TB, but also seen on Crucial SSDs), under synchronous writes, will regularly produce latency spikes of 10 seconds or more, due to the way they need to manage their cells. This is much worse than any HDD. If a DRAMless consumer SSD is all that you have, better use zram.

thank goodness Kubernetes got support for swap; zswap has been a great boon for one of my workloads