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- Embed this notice@malin it really varies. i run disk encryption and not compression so i could not comment from experience.
the smarter systems (i *think* btrfs and bcachefs do this) will speculatively compress the first eight kilobytes or so of a file, and if they don't see an improvement it marks the file as uncompressible. this means they don't waste time trying to compact files that effectively can't be--like jpegs, mp4s, etc, so only your loose little text files are actually processed (sans the overhead of speculating if they can be compressed.)
i think @Jessica runs a compressed FS?
you can also set up RAM compression. Apple has been using that standard on all macs for the past five or so years to cheap out on upgrading the memory in macbooks. linux can do it too, to some extent, but you have to go in and set up the tradeoffs. i have not used that feature either because i have more than enough memory, but its an option that does work for certain use cases.