Proxmox Memory Usage

[janvv]

The Proxmox dashboard says almost 80% of the memory is used.
I checked that it adds up the max memory of the virtual machines and containers. That's about 50Gb in total.
When I add up the real memory usage (like the 111Mb of my media server), then the total is around 20Gb.

I am wondering what Proxmox actually does. Is it allocating all memory that I defined for the machines? When I check the `free` command on the server, it looks like that.
That would mean I still have 12Gb for new VMs instead of the 32Gb that is still available when looking at the actual memory usage.

 

[Johannes S]

The Host doesn't know how much RAM is actually used by the guests, RAM allocated to a guest can't be used otherwise normally ( there are some exceptions see https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Dynamic_Memory_Management )

To actually know how much ram is used by the guest you will need to deploy a monitoring Tool like checkmk, icinga2, zabbix or prometheus.

If the monitoring shows thst a guest actually don't need that much ram, you can change the ram size in the vm config.

See also:

J

Thread 'Proxmox VE rocks, except for this one thing, the memory usage graph.'

Jun 22, 2024

We have a couple of pretty beefy VM hosts running the latest VE and have on one host a fairly beefy VM because it is running a Mastodon server with 200 active accounts on it. However, the displayed memory usage in the Proxmox VE dashboard for this VM always shows 97% and higher memory utilization when it isn't being utilized like what is being displayed. A lot of the memory used is cached (we are still working on this part), but even when we clear the cache from time to time, the UI dashboard always shows memory max at 97% or higher.

1. Are there any tips for standard Ubuntu VM's...

• jpop
• memory memory consumption ubuntu 20.04
• Replies: 36
• Forum: Proxmox VE: Installation and configuration

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Please also note, that it's normal for Linux to use RAM for Caches since unused RAM is wasted:

https://www.linuxatemyram.com/