Looking in the output of parted -l I see /dev/zram listed as a “loop” partition table. It is only 52.4MB. It has an ext2 filesystem. There is also /dev/zram0 which is also a loop, and it is only using 1043MB. It is labled as a linux-swap(v1) filesystem. This is it. So, there are two seperate RAM devices as swap, using a combined 1095.4MB (or, approx 1.07 GB). This means that 952.32MB would be free for the system outside of swap. No wonder this thing isn’t working correctly!
More on zram can be found here.
In such a case, I think that it’s probably better to just reserve 1 GB or so of diskspace to swap rather than overtax the limited ram on the device. The problem with this of course is that this is a microSD card and not an actual HDD or SDD. Would that be too read/write intensive for the microSD card?
Maybe the swap-space in the RAM block would be good to simply be reduced in size.However, good practice shows that swap is made to be 2X the amount of RAM, so 4GB is actually what swap should be on this system. In such a case, reducing it even further would probably render the system even more inoperable.
Usually, I keep these things as seperate partitions for optimum efficency. On a portable device, especially one running the system on a microSD card, the opppisite would probably happen and it would be more prone to error. Besides this, the system arrived already installed and with a user. Any new flashes of ClockworkOS I assume to have the same without a partition guide or anything else.
I think the best course of action is to stop using the default zram, and make a large swapfile on the microSD card. I will do this later and report back.