proxmox memory usage / proxmox front end on a different box?

[harisund]

I installed debian-Jessie, followed it up by a Proxmox install on top of that following instructions here - pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_Jessie (I am not allowed to post links).

After a default install, with nothing configured, nothing installed, no change whatsoever, my memory usage is hovering at over 1GB, as seen in Server View -> host machine -> Summary.
Load Average is 0.00, 0.03, 0.05
CPU usage is 0%
IO delay is 0%
Swap usage is at 0
However, RAM usage on this page is showing up as Used: 956 MB.

For what it's worth, my PVE manager version is pve-manager/4.0-57/cc7c2b53
and kernel version is 4.2.3-2-pve #1 SMP


Displaying via TOP, I see that the bulk of the memory is being used up by -pvedaemon-worker, pveproxy-worker. There are multiple threads of these, and these are taking up bulk of the 1GB RAM.

Is there anyway I can lower their RAM usage?

Additionally, I have another Linux box, which is basically an old laptop at home. Can I have the "proxmox front end" on this box (this box is Atom, doesn't support virtualization), and manage my virtualization host from this laptop, without installing any "heavy" resources on the virtualization host ?

Or, is there anyway I can "stop" the PVE manager from running when not needing it (95% of the time), and fire it up on demand? I plan on installing some Linux containers, a couple of Linux VMs and a couple of Windows VMs, and all of them will have SSH access (remote desktop for Win), so once I have the VMs setup , I won't be needing proxmox VE to be running, just the VMs themselves. Is what I am imagining somehow possible?

 

[pirateghost]

Not really possible. But RAM is cheap. Just add more RAM.

 

[harisund]

Not really possible. But RAM is cheap. Just add more RAM.

True, I guess I could always do that. It is just a curiosity thing, stuff like CentOS can be brought down to less than 100MB usage, and then the remaining just for KVM VMs, (and compared to proxmox VE taking up 900+MB, that's at least room for one or two more VMs right there). I am wondering if I should just suck it up, learn how to be proficient with libvirtd / virt-install / virsh / qemu and not rely on the fancy web GUI, especially if the fancy web GUI takes up so much RAM and is not going to be used 95+% of the time.

 

[dietmar]

True, I guess I could always do that. It is just a curiosity thing, stuff like CentOS can be brought down to less than 100MB usage.

A default proxmox installation is full featured, including the whole cluster stack, a distributed cluster file systems for configuration, HA, API server, RRD database, ...
And you currently get 1GB ECC RAM for less than 10Euro.

Anyways, recent system/perl updates increased memory usage, so I opened a bug here:

https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=831

Maybe we can optimize this a bit more.

 

[harisund]

A default proxmox installation is full featured, including the whole cluster stack, a distributed cluster file systems for configuration, HA, API server, RRD database, ...
And you currently get 1GB ECC RAM for less than 10Euro.

Anyways, recent system/perl updates increased memory usage, so I opened a bug here:

https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=831

Maybe we can optimize this a bit more.

Thanks for opening the bug report.

Also, I agree with you, the default proxmox installation has a ton of features, well worth the RAM consumption. The thing is, I don't use (atleast not yet) over 90% of the features, and I am simply using it the same way someone new to virtualization would do by installing VirtualBox on their personal laptop and spinning up a few VMs. So I find those features overkill, and was wondering if there was a way to "turn them off" temporarily till I really have more hosts and start doing more critical things.