slabtop command (part of the package procps) shows top memory objects used by the kernel.
dstat can help you figure out what is happening. dstat -cdnpmgs --top-bio --top-cpu --top-mem
Also have a look at smem ("smem -kt"), it can show you nicely what is in your swap.
ZRAM if you have no HDD/SSD swap partition.
ZSWAP if you do have a HDD/SSD swap partition.
ZCACHE: It does what ZSWAP does and ALSO compresses and speeds the filesystem page cache. (It is internally much more complicated and is not in the mainline kernel as it is still under development).
J. Nivre. Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, page 351-359. Association for Computational Linguistics Morristown, NJ, USA, Association for Computational Linguistics Morristown, NJ, USA, (2009)Uppsala University.
S. Buschbeck, S. Bortoli, and H. Stoermer. Swap: Workshop on Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives, volume 426 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, (December 2008)
{. Kuck. Veröffentlichungen des Seminars für Versicherungswissenschaft der Universität Hamburg und des Vereins zur Förderung der Versicherungswissenschaft VVW, Karlsruhe, (2000)