Discrepancy in RAM utilization

whiggs

New Member
Dec 11, 2024
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Hello all. Haven't had much luck getting a response to the numerous issues that I have encountered with proxmox. I have been the advocating to use proxmox with my employer for the project I have been tasked with, and they would purchase subscriptions for each proxmox instance that we need to deploy if they decide to go with proxmox, but I am just having THE hardest time convincing them when legitimate questions go unanswered and we can't get it to load our image without crashing. If I can get it to work without crashing, then proxmox is what we are going to use, but they are also aware of the questions going unanswered too (doesn't look good to enterprise who will need similar levels of support). So, a recap. The overall problem I am trying to fix is proxmox vms freezing when I connect to them via a spice client, and I have noticed several potential individual issues that might be contributing to it. For example, I recently posted this issue involving what I believe to be duplicate services that are being created when installing all the necessary drivers on the virtual machines. Today, I have noticed another peculiarity. It would seem, for some reason, there is a discrepancy in the amount of ram that the vm itself indicates it is using, and the amount the vm's proxmox summary page reports the vm is using. So, I turned a vm back on after assigning it 16 GB of RAM, and, after it booted, I connected to it via a spice client to bring up the task manager to monitor its resource consumption. I immediately noticed a discrepancy, as the summary page was reporting that 8GB were in use right after startup, task manager within the vm itself was reporting only around 2GB of memory used. Then, I went to the bathroom, and when I got back, not only had the vm frozen (due to connection with the spice client) and still displaying the task manager in the resource consumption at the time of freezing, but the vm summary page also shows a huge jump in the memory consumed to 15GB:
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2025-02-25 11_44_27-prox - Proxmox Virtual Environment and 17 more pages - Profile 1 - Microso...png
 
For RAM usage, it's well known.
it's not an issue.
There is new topic each week, with same question, same screenshot...
RAM displayed in PVE, is the real physical RAM reserved for the VM, even if VM use 2 GB RAM, 16 GB are reserved, VM will use his free RAM as cache.
Using Ballooning option, RAM displayed will be the RAM from POV of the VM which help you, to adapt RAM assigned, but real RAM used from POV of PVE keep 16 GB.
Over the time, if you see VM run always under 10 GB then you can lower the assigned RAM.

(sorry for my English wording)
 
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