Having high swap usage on one of my Proxmox VE nodes

Dec 17, 2021
19
1
8
Ohio
I have three Proxmox VE nodes in my environment. Two of them have 4 cores/4 threads, one of them has 4 cores/8 threads. Node 3, the high swap usage one, has the 4 core / 8 thread and 32GB of DDR4 memory and as seen in the picture, it isn't even using 3/4 of the RAM available. The history of the RAM usage indicates normal highs and lows but nothing ever exceeding 4/5 of the RAMs total. I am only able to recreate this every few weeks because the swap slowly goes up and up and up until one day, where I'm forced to power down some VMs then power them back up again. (mind you, the RAM usages goes back up to it's previous state but the swap is lower). This only temporarily fixes the problem.

This issue has been happening ever since I installed node 3, about a year ago. So I'm wondering if the issue is hardware related. Anything I can show or do to test if it's hardware related or not?
 

Attachments

  • High Swap Proxmox.png
    High Swap Proxmox.png
    124.2 KB · Views: 43
High swap usage is not an issue with Linux, even though the line is colored red. Trashing swap with high disk i/O is a problem, but that does not appear to be the case. I would not worry about it.
 
High swap usage is not an issue with Linux, even though the line is colored red. Trashing swap with high disk i/O is a problem, but that does not appear to be the case. I would not worry about it.
I apologize, I should have mentioned that that is in fact what is happening. Whenever I do certain actions on node 3 (the one with high swap), the IO delay spikes and responsiveness to the system decreases dramatically and I have to wait almost 3-5 minutes for whatever task to finish / for the screen to display whatever information for the VM / LXC.
The other nodes don't even use 20% of their swap. It's just this one system. Like I said, the solution is rebooting VMs but I don't want to reboot VMs every other week or so.
 
I don't wrote from SWAPing in the Proxmox PVE system. I know the Proxmox PVE system must have enough Memory, incl. the need of RAM for the PVE and Systemcaches, so all data can be hold on RAM.
 
I apologize, I should have mentioned that that is in fact what is happening. Whenever I do certain actions on node 3 (the one with high swap), the IO delay spikes and responsiveness to the system decreases dramatically and I have to wait almost 3-5 minutes for whatever task to finish / for the screen to display whatever information for the VM / LXC.
The other nodes don't even use 20% of their swap. It's just this one system. Like I said, the solution is rebooting VMs but I don't want to reboot VMs every other week or so.
You should test your disk, It happend to me an error with a server with a similar behavior, in certain cases the system become un responsive, this was caused because of a faulty battery on the cache over the SAS card.
I was able to reproduce by stressing the disk with a write test.
 

About

The Proxmox community has been around for many years and offers help and support for Proxmox VE, Proxmox Backup Server, and Proxmox Mail Gateway.
We think our community is one of the best thanks to people like you!

Get your subscription!

The Proxmox team works very hard to make sure you are running the best software and getting stable updates and security enhancements, as well as quick enterprise support. Tens of thousands of happy customers have a Proxmox subscription. Get yours easily in our online shop.

Buy now!