3 node Proxmox cluster high shared memory usage

T

thelovebelow

New Member
Oct 10, 2025
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I just started my Proxmox journey so forgive me for asking stupid questions. I created a cluster from scratch with 3 nodes and played around with the ESXi migration wizard. I have maybe 8 VMs running, doing not at lot at the moment. Two PVE nodes have 4 TB RAM, 1 node has 2 TB RAM. On the nodes with 4 TB, I noticed 50% RAM usage, which surprised me, because it doesn't run (almost) anything. On the node with 2 TB, no shared memory is assigned. Upon investigating where this 50% consumption is coming from, I saw 2 TB is used as 'Shared'. Is this normal behavior?

shared_mem.png

See htop output, there's no VM nothing running on this 4 TB node:
htop.png
 
Johannes S said:
This is expected see https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/f...ram-usage-of-the-vms-in-the-dashboard.165943/ and https://linuxatemyram.com
Click to expand...
I don't think this is expected. This issue popped up again this week. As we have sufficient RAM available, I didn't really look into it. We had a workaround by manually rebooting the host. A couple of hours ago, I saw it popping up on another host. When looking into it, I noticed the 2TB is in use by this:

korpmh002_1.png

I deleted VM 181 this morning, so it looks like deleting a VM triggers this behavior. When I manually delete the file, it frees up the 2TB RAM in use. It looks like Proxmox cannot fully delete the VM, and afterwards it decided to consume 2TB of RAM. Inspecting the file with the 'file' informs me it is seen as a 'data' file, and running lsof doesn't return anything.

Vgs and pvs are all reporting healthy. I'm running PVE 9.0.3.
 
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