Hi,
tl;dr: How does swap and swappiness affect ballooning growth?
I have a few VMs running Alpine Linux 3.15/3.16/3.17 and have over-provisioned the ram with the Ballooning device ticked.
Most of them have the minimum ram set to between 512 and 4096 MB, with the maximum up to 75% of the host's RAM based on projected need.
All of them have their root disks on the mirrored SSD
Inside the VMs they are all set up with a swap partition that setup-alpine makes when installing the OS.
I have noticed that ballooning works when giving memory back to the host/other VMs but to make it grow, I have to initially set
If I don't run
Because of this I've never low/out of memory on the host but often do inside the VMs. So, questions:
tl;dr: How does swap and swappiness affect ballooning growth?
I have a few VMs running Alpine Linux 3.15/3.16/3.17 and have over-provisioned the ram with the Ballooning device ticked.
Most of them have the minimum ram set to between 512 and 4096 MB, with the maximum up to 75% of the host's RAM based on projected need.
All of them have their root disks on the mirrored SSD
rpool/zfs-local, /var on a separate disk image on the same pool and /data on the big spinny disk poolInside the VMs they are all set up with a swap partition that setup-alpine makes when installing the OS.
I have noticed that ballooning works when giving memory back to the host/other VMs but to make it grow, I have to initially set
actual to a value greater than minimum memory manually before it will happen automatically.If I don't run
balloon= in their monitor tab the VMs will swap out memory until swap is full then go oom at minimum memory allocation.Because of this I've never low/out of memory on the host but often do inside the VMs. So, questions:
- How does SWAP affect balloon growth?
- Would it be more performant to turn off swap inside the VMs?
- Alternatively, should I set swappiness to a lower number inside the VMs than on the host?
- Alt-alternatively, should I mount SWAP as tmpfs inside the VMs?