Early studies on Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI) primarily relied on the Navier-Stokes (NS) model. As research progresses, it becomes increasingly evident that the kinetic information that the NS model failed to capture is of great value for identifying and even controlling the RTI process; simultaneously, the lack of analysis techniques for complex physical fields results in a significant waste of data information. In addition, early RTI studies mainly focused on the incompressible case and the weakly compressible case. In the case of strong compressibility, the density of the fluid from the upper layer (originally heavy fluid) may become smaller than that of the surrounding (originally light) fluid, thus invalidating the early method of distinguishing light and heavy fluids based on density. In this paper, tracer particles are incorporated into a single-fluid discrete Boltzmann method (DBM) model that considers the van der Waals potential. By using tracer particles to label the matter-particle sources, a careful study of the matter-mixing and energy-mixing processes of the RTI evolution is realized in the single-fluid framework. The effects of compressibility on the evolution of RTI are examined mainly through the analysis of bubble and spike velocities, the ratio of area occupied by heavy fluid, and various entropy generation rates of the system. It is demonstrated that: (1) compressibility has a suppressive effect on the spike velocity, and this suppressive impact diminishes as the Atwood number ($At$) increases. The influence of compressibility on bubble velocity shows a staged behavior with increasing $At$. (2) The impact of compressibility on the entropy production rate associated with the heat flow (${{\dot{S}}_{NOEF}}$) is related to the stages of RTI evolution.
