Techniques for building a list of swap candidate pages for host swapping are provided. In one embodiment, a host system can determine a swap target virtual machine (VM) and a target number of swap candidate pages. The host system can further select a memory page from a memory space of the swap target VM and can check whether the memory page is sharable or compressible. If the memory page is sharable or compressible, the host system can add the memory page to the list of swap candidate pages.