[SOLVED] Proxmox 8 Debian VM showing near 100% memory usage in GUI but usage on system is less than 250mb

[optical]

Hey all, I searched for this question before posting and found some older threads dating from years back that all seemed to imply this problem was solved in later Proxmox versions

But I am on the latest proxmox, and having the issue. It is a VM with 3GB ram assigned to it (I went and increased it from 2GB because I saw it maxed out in the GUI and said holy crap before actually checking on the VM itself) and even after adding another GB it instantly maxed out.

So I went onto the VM itself, latest Debian distro, simply running a torrent daemon at this time - and lo and behold the actual usage is under 300mb while the GUI is still showing it spiked up to nearly 100% and stayed there -- forever!

Is there some basic solution I can do to fix this? Even if it's just cosmetic, it's annoying not knowing the actual usage

Thanks very much

 

[leesteken]

What is the output of free -m inside the VM?
Did you install the QEMU Guest Agent inside the VM and enabled it in the VM Options? Did you enable the Ballooning Device in VM Hardware, Memory (even when you are not using ballooning)?
It's probably filesystem cache (which makes sense for torrents) and the VM is just making use of all memory you give it (but would also work fine with less memory).

 

[optical]

What is the output of free -m inside the VM?
Did you install the QEMU Guest Agent inside the VM and enabled it in the VM Options? Did you enable the Ballooning Device in VM Hardware, Memory (even when you are not using ballooning)?
It's probably filesystem cache (which makes sense for torrents) and the VM is just making use of all memory you give it (but would also work fine with less memory).

Hi leesteken thanks for responding.

This is the output:

root@media:~# free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            2908         268         114           8        2526        2444
Swap:            974           7         967

And the GUI is showing it spiked up at 90-100% at the same time

Thanks again

 

[leesteken]

Hi leesteken thanks for responding.

This is the output:

root@media:~# free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            2908         268         114           8        2526        2444
Swap:            974           7         967

So it is filesystem cache, which is good for performance. 2444MiB is available if needed for other things inside the VM.

And the GUI is showing it spiked up at 90-100% at the same time

Well, the VM is actually using the full 3GiB except for 114MiB, which matches the graph. This is normal: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

Did you install the QEMU Guest Agent inside the VM and enabled it in the VM Options? Did you enable the Ballooning Device in VM Hardware, Memory (even when you are not using ballooning)?

 

[optical]

Hmm, I think the qemu thing might've fixed it! It clearly was not installed properly or working properly I should say.. After googling your instructions about QEMU Guest Agent I found an older post detailing how to enable it, which I did, and it still didn't work. Then by fluke I lucked out into finding another post that said if you pass the `qm` command while the VM is running - even after a reboot - it still won't work. So I shut the system down completely, THEN ran the `qm` command on the VMID to enable it, and THEN I noticed on the very next reboot, a new line at the top of the screen appears when going into the Console saying something about QEMU Connected - and now finally - from this point onwards - the RAM usage seems to be working correctly now in the GUI

I did not get into the other stuff with ballooning even. Do I want it enabled, or not? It's always been enabled by default and I don't know what it is, so I've always left it on thus far

Let me know on that ballooning thing, thanks again for all of your help