That would serve to reduce effective memory usage or need to fall back to swap. I would not expect something like that to be responsible for more than, say, a 5

That would serve to reduce effective memory usage or need to fall back to swap. I would not expect something like that to be responsible for more than, say, a 5-10% RAM usage decrease though. I think you can reach a lot more than that. Presumably, on Intel they use something like LZO or LZ4, since it compresses/decompresses without too much CPU overhead. But if you have dedicated hardware for something like e.g. Brotli or zstd, one could reach much higher compression ratios. Of course, this is assuming that memory can be compressed well, but I think this is true in many cases. E.g. when selecting one of the program/library files in the squash benchmarks: https://quixdb.github.io/squash-benchmark/ https://quixdb.github.io/squash-benchmark/ you can observe higher compression ratios for e.g. Brotli/gzip/deflate than LZO/LZ4.