High (and unusual) memory and cpu usage after upgrade to PVE 9

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Clumpton

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Oct 8, 2024
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Under 8.4 I had a WIndows 7 32 bit VM (for a very good reason) which ran smoothly with 3GB ram (ballooned), usually using 2.2GB. Windows would show about 1GB free.
I have just upgraded (smoothly) to PVE 9 and when I fired up this VM the memory usage shot up to 3 GB and stayed there. Windows still showed small memory usage.
Thinking this could be a driver issue I turned off ballooning and rebooted. Identical behaviour!
I upped the ram to 3.5 GB, same result and Windows still saying that it's using 1.25GB.
The VM isn't running as smoothly as usual and I'm getting dreadful pops and pauses in USB DAC audio.

I hadn't noticed but the cpu usage which was usually a steady 15% has also shot up to 45% (thanks to SteveITS for spotting that).

Any ideas/help please?
pve9.JPG
pve9b.JPG
pve9c.JPG
Addendum, here's what memory usage looked like the last time I fired up the VM under 8.4
pve9d.JPG
 
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SteveITS said:
The ballooning should kick in once the host RAM usage is over 80% IIRC by default.

I’d the 45% CPU expected?
Click to expand...
Hi, thanks for replying.
No the CPU is usually 15% (running an audio app) - well spotted!
Editing the title...
 
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Hello, same here after update to 9.
I've got 4 vm 3 of which show weird ram usage in Proxmox gui.
I've got an opnsense firewall an alpine linuxbox and an ubuntu mate box, all with ram usage maxed out with or without ballonig enabled.
The only machine which show normal ram usage is an Ubuntu server.
All the Vm have no graphical interface.
 
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Update: Memory problem apparently solved by changing cpu to QEMU64, booting Windows, shutdown and back to x86-64-v3.
Processor still running slightly high and occasional sound drop-outs.
Seems to be aggravated by activity in the NoVNC browser window (lots of vu-meters and wave-forms), going to try an RdP connection instead.
UPDATE Using RdP seems to improve audio problems and general smoothness. Since noVNC is using the server to display the host windows whereas RdP uses the host directly this could point to a problem somewhere with noVNC?pve9e.JPG
 
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Hi,

I noticed after upgrading our PVE 8 to 9 that our Windows 2022 VMs were constantly reporting around 100.5% memory usage for the guest.

From:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Upgrade_from_8_to_9#VM_Memory_Consumption_Shown_is_Higher

I read this:
This happens if one of the following conditions applies:

  • The Ballooning Device has been disabled in the advanced memory settings of the VM.This removes the communication channel to gather the guest's internal memory usage information.
Click to expand...

Does that mean that since PVE 9, to have the memory usage correctly reported, I need to enable ballooning for the VMs ?
We usually don't enable ballooning as I had read here and there that it's a best practice not to enable it if you don't need it.
Is that something that will stay like this ?

I enabled ballooning on some of the VMs with the minimal memory set to the same amount of "maximum" memory and it does indeed now report the memory usage correctly.

Kind regards
 
C

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@cshill This video should help, it seems like exactly the right thing to fix the memory reporting problem. :)
 
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