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I have a Samsung Galaxy S23 with 8 GB of RAM. One UI has a feature called RAM Plus, and based from online research and personal testing, it doesn't really do what it claims to, which is to allocate internal storage as virtual RAM. Instead, it just allows users to set their own zRAM size. With the feature off, zRAM defaults to 3 GB, like recent Google Pixels. My phone came with it enabled and the zRAM set to 8 GB.

Is it advisable to set the zRAM size to be the same as the physical RAM size? Should I set it lower, like around half which is apparently what Linux distros such as Fedora recommend? Or, should I just disable the feature, which sets zRAM to 3 GB like what Pixels have?

Thanks in advance.

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  • Also saving battery @Robert
    – beeshyams
    Commented May 6 at 12:11
  • @Robert I think you are mistaken. I don't understand why you referenced flash memory when zRAM sits entirely in RAM (developer.android.com/topic/performance/memory-management). Also, you can't disable zRAM without root. If I disable the RAM Plus setting, the zRAM is set to 3 GB.
    – sultanofswing
    Commented May 6 at 12:55
  • I think this question misses a good description what zRAM actually is and how it works. I found a good description with examples in the Arch Linux Wiki. Note that the zRAM size is the uncompressed size of this compressing RAM disk. In the end to answer your question it would be necessary to know for what purpose Samsung Android uses zRAM. If all the stored data has a good compression rate then a size of 100% RAM size wouldn't be a problem.
    – Robert
    Commented May 6 at 13:31
  • There's no universal ideal size of zRAM. If Android often kills your apps (from cached state) due to running short on RAM, you need a bigger zRAM. If you always have free RAM (which isn't very probable), you don't need zRAM at all. Estimate your position between these 2 extremes. But even if you've ample free RAM, setting zRAM equal to RAM size won't do any harm. Android kernel will just not swap any data to zRAM.
    – Irfan Latif
    Commented May 8 at 20:40
  • Related: Android apps “Cached” state // purpose of swap and zRAM on Android // view RAM and swap usage on Android // Disclosure: These links belong to me.
    – Irfan Latif
    Commented May 8 at 20:41

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