zswap

Compare

Interest

Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "zswap" over time.

Mentions

Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "zswap" over time.

zswap is a Linux kernel feature that provides a compressed write-back cache for swapped pages, as a form of virtual memory compression. Instead of moving memory pages to a swap device when they are to be swapped out, zswap performs their compression and then stores them into a memory pool dynamically allocated in the system RAM. Later writeback to the actual swap device is deferred or even completely avoided, resulting in a significantly reduced I/O for Linux systems that require swapping; the tradeoff is the need for additional CPU cycles to perform the compression. Read more on Wikipedia

© 2026 HN Trends. Built by Ben Evans. HN Trends is not affiliated with Hacker News or Y Combinator.