Databases are special. They ofte implement their own optimizations, faster than more general system optimizations.

For examole: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/wal-intro.html

Because WAL restores database file contents after a crash, journaled file systems are not necessary for reliable storage of the data files or WAL files. In fact, journaling overhead can reduce performance, especially if journaling causes file system data to be flushed to disk. Fortunately, data flushing during journaling can often be disabled with a file system mount option, e.g., data=writeback on a Linux ext3 file system. Journaled file systems do improve boot speed after a crash.

I didn’t see much in the docs about swap, but I wouldn’t be suprised if postgres also had memory optimizations, like it included it’s own form of in memory compression.

Your best bet is probably to ask someone who is familiar with the internals of postgres.

Zram does not impede disk cache, it’s a block device with compression, unavailable to the kernel for anything else.

I do wonder what you’re trying to achieve by moving swap to zram? You’re potentially moving pages in and out of swap for no real reason, with compression, where the swap wouldn’t have occurred if zram weren’t in place.

Linux has kind of two forms of memory pages (entries in RAM), one is a file cache (page cache) and the other is “memory allocated by programs for work” (anonymous pages).

When you look at memory consumed by a process you are looking at RSS, page/file cache is part of kernel and for example in btop corresponds to Cached.

Page cache can never be moved into swap - that would be the same as duplicating the file from one place on a disk to another place on a (possibly different) disk.
If more memory is needed, page cache is evicted (written back into the respective file, if changed). Only anonymous pages (not backed by anything permanent) can be moved into swap.

So what does “PostgreSQL heavily relies on the OSs disk cache” mean? The more free memory there is, the more files can be kept cached in RAM and the faster postgres can then retrieve these files.

When you add zram, you dedicate part of actual RAM to a compressed swap device which, as I said above, will never contain page cache.
In theory this still increases the total available memory but in reality that is only true if you configure the kernel to aggressively “swap” anonymous pages into the zram backed swap.

Notes: I tried to simplify this a bit so it might not be exact, also if you look at a process, the memory consumed by it is called RSS and it contains multiple different things not just memory directly allocated by the code of the program.

Based on what I’ve seen with my use of ZRam I don’t think it reserves the total space, but instead consumes whatever is shown in the output of zramctl --output-all. If you’re swapping then yes it would take memory from the system (up to the 8G disk size), based on how compressible the swapped content is (like if you’re getting a 3x ratio it’s 8GB/3=2.6GB). That said - it will take memory from the disk cache if you’re swapping.

Realistically I think your issue is IO and there’s not much you can do with if your disk cache is being flushed. Switching to zswap might help as it should spill more into disk if you’re under memory pressure.

Sounds easy enough to test experimentally.

If possible, use zswap. it is more flexible, and effictively functions like swap. reduce swappiness a lot (something like 5 or 10). zram afaik is not flexible, swap is.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/471912/zram-vs-zswap-vs-zcache-ultimate-guide-when-to-use-which-one

this suggests you to have a physical swap too. I for one do not have it. so i have a bit of wierdity, but performs fine imo. maybe give it a try

• Use zram devices equal to the number of threads in your system.
• Use zstd compression.
• Mount zram devices as swap with high priority.
• Mount disk swap partition(s) with low priority.
• Increase swapiness:

     sysctl vm.swappiness=<larger number than default>
  

• Use zramctlto see detailed info about your zram disks.
• Check with iotop to see if something unexpected is using a lot of IO traffic.

Yes, configuring memory to be used for zram would mark it as unavailable for kernel fs caching.

Does iostat show your disks being pegged when it’s slow? Odd that performance would be so bad on those specs, makes me think you have disk Io issues maybe.