zram tends to change the calculus of how to setup the memory behavior of your kernel.

On a system with integrated graphics and 8 (16 logical) cores and 32 GB of system memory I achieve what appears to be optimal performance using:

    zramen --algorithm zstd --size 200 --priority 100 --max-size 131072 make
    sysctl vm.swappiness=180
    sysctl vm.page-cluster=0
    sysctl vm.vfs_cache_pressure=200
    sysctl vm.dirty_background_ratio=1
    sysctl vm.dirty_ratio=2
    sysctl vm.watermark_boost_factor=0
    sysctl vm.watermark_scale_factor=125
    sysctl kernel.nmi_watchdog=0
    sysctl vm.min_free_kbytes=150000
    sysctl vm.dirty_expire_centisecs=1500
    sysctl vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs=1500

Compression factor tends to stay above 3.0. At very little cost I more than doubled my effective system memory. If an individual workload uses a significant fraction of system memory at once complications may arise.