With my workflow the memory compression on macos does not help much. zram in Linux works much better. For example, few years ago I could run a couple of Eclipse instances and a browser with a few opened tabs on 2GB Chromebook, but 4GB Macbook Air with Yosemite struggled to run a browser, IDE and 1.7GB VM. It turned out that bumping VM size to 2.2 GB, activating zram there and running IDE inside VM lead to much more responsive setup. And it seems Sierra has not changed the picture, https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/52779