High committed memory

[elvinmammadov]

Hello,
We have a Dell server running with Proxmox 8. The server has 64GB RAM.
1st VM has 36GB RAM
2nd VM has 16GB RAM
3rd VM has 4GB RAM



Checkmk showed that there is a high memory usage on the server.



I have noticed in the Proxmox shell that VMs uses high Virtual memory than allocated.



Could you please let me know if it is normal that the Virtual Memory should be higher than the allocated memory? If not, is it a good idea to limit the Virtual Memory usage? Thanks.

 

[Folke]

Hi,
it is normal for the virtual memory to be higher than the what is allocated, as it includes shared libraries, swapped out pages and unused but allocated memory [0]. Virtual memory is not a good measure for ram usage, because some processes allocate a huge amount of memory "just in case". To provide an absurd example, the element client on my desktop currently has a virtual memory of over one terabyte, but will probably never use more than half a GB.



Similar questions have been seen in the checkmk forum, with answer from chekmk partners, suggesting to raise or disable the threshold [1].

[0] https://www.baeldung.com/linux/resident-set-vs-virtual-memory-size
[1] https://forum.checkmk.com/t/proxmox-ve-memory-usage-crit-but-memory-ok/38849

 

[sb-jw]

We have also deactivated this value in checkmk and no longer take it into account. We've never had any problems with it, so in my opinion it's safe to do it that way.

 

[elvinmammadov]

Thank you very much for your help. I have disabled the threshold in Checkmk.