My machine has 32 GB of RAM and an i7-10700 whose cores mostly sit idle, yet it freezes the moment memory gets tight. With a few lines of config I handed half the RAM to zram as a compressed swap, trading spare CPU for more usable memory. Along the way I hit a gotcha on Ubuntu 22.04: following the newer config syntax got me only 4 GB. This is the full walkthrough — the problem, how it works, the configuration, and fixing that trap.