PMG iso/appliance VS LXC (8.2)

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beebob

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May 18, 2025
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Greetings,

i run PMG in a dedicated VM for a couple of years already.
Hardware assigned: 4cores and 2GB of RAM.


I recently got the idea of moving it into a LXC Container on one of my Proxmox PVE Hosts.
Silly as i am, i assigned the same hardware ressources as the dedicated VM had.

The container will boot to the login screen, and once i try to login (gui), it freezes.


Solution: add 2 more gig of ram.
The PMG Dashboard tells me that right after login it consumes 3.5 GB of RAM, in a out of the box official template without customziation. After a few minutes it goes down to 2.1 GB of usuage.

My dedicated VM (8.2) uses 1.6 GB of RAM (old and ill configured)


I am rather new to LXC, i was led to believe that those containers are way more lightweight than regular VM's.


Is my expectation wrong or is that a unintended behavior?
 
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Stoiko Ivanov said:
Check the logs of your VM and of the LXC - my guess is that clamav simply gets killed due to running out-of-memory.
see https://pmg.proxmox.com/pmg-docs/pmg-admin-guide.html#system_requirements
Click to expand...
yes, this is exactly what happened. Also i am aware that i am slightly violating the minimum requirements :) .


I think i was rather unclear, i do not have a real "issue" nor a problem to be solved.
I am just a bit confused by the fact that a out of the box LXC PMG needs more RAM than a out of the box PMG installed via ISO.
My expectation was that the opposite would be true.
 
beebob said:
yes, this is exactly what happened. Also i am aware that i am slightly violating the minimum requirements :) .


I think i was rather unclear, i do not have a real "issue" nor a problem to be solved.
I am just a bit confused by the fact that a out of the box LXC PMG needs more RAM than a out of the box PMG installed via ISO.
My expectation was that the opposite would be true.
Click to expand...
Is clamav running, similarly configured and using similar resources on the vm based instance?
I considered temporarily disabling clamav, to get a PMG CT's ram requirement below 2GB, when I was running low on memory for a while.
 
keeka said:
Is clamav running, similarly configured and using similar resources on the vm based instance?
I considered temporarily disabling clamav, to get a PMG CT's ram requirement below 2GB, when I was running low on memory for a while.
Click to expand...
i am not a specialist, so take what i say with a grain of salt.

I imported my config from the VM into a LXC instance, (with AV) and can clearly see it uses 2.1-2.8 GB instead of 1.6-1.7 GB of RAM. Disabling both AV services on the LCX Container reduces the RAM usage down to below 1GB.

However, i only know how to "stop" it from the administration/services tab, Its not a permanent solution, as it will start with the next boot again.
 
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In my PMG container, clamd uses 33% of the 4GB memory assigned to the CT and I have swap disabled.

How much swap was available to the VM vs what you've allocated your container? Maybe that's why you managed to get PMG running in the VM.
Have you checked swap utilisation in the VM vs swap available/utilised in the container?
 
i cannot check anymore. sorry. But i am fairly certain, that when i installed from the ISO i took the "next..next... next" approach. Meaning, all default and suggested settings by the installer. So, if swap is enabled by default by the installer, than i had a swap drive.
 
I bet it is down to total memory available. As you say in your earlier post, containerised PMG should need less total memory (real + virtual) than same config running in a VM.
 
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