In you initial post you highlighted the output of of 'free -m' as evidence that your configuration was not taking effect. The 'free -m' command shows you the size of the zram-configured swap (not the size of its backing file) so I assumed that that's what you were trying to adjust the size of. Your initial configuration will work to adjust the size of the backing file; you can check with 'ls -lh /var/swap'.
The backingfile behaves very differently from traditional swap, from the swap.conf man page:
The backingfile behaves very differently from traditional swap, from the swap.conf man page:
The [backing] file is not used as a traditional swap device; instead, zram occasionally writes idle pages to it to free up RAM, reducing SD card wear through infrequent writes.
WritebackPeriodicInterval=
The interval between subsequent writeback operations
when using the "timer" trigger. This determines how
frequently zram will write back less active pages to
the backing swap file. Takes a time span value. See
systemd.time(7) for details on the syntax. This set‐
ting is ignored for other triggers. Defaults to
"24h".
Statistics: Posted by roliver — Wed Nov 12, 2025 4:36 pm