Proxmox UI reports wrong memory usage

[h3imdull]

We have a few Linux vms (Debian Buster) where Proxmox is reporting way higher usage than what the vm IS using.

In the UI I get this:
93.96% (15.03 GiB of 16.00 GiB)

$ free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 15Gi 6.4Gi 642Mi 17Mi 8.6Gi 9.1Gi
Swap: 0B 0B 0B

So looking at this I still have 9.1Gi available. Its almost like the used reported is Used + buff/cache?

 

[dcsapak]

used (~6.4) + buf/cache (~8.6) = ~15
even if the vm says that there are 9.1 G available, it uses them as buffers and cache, which the layer above (pve) cannot know, it only sees the
memory used by the vm...

 

[h3imdull]

So I feel that is wrong since the buffer/cache memory is reclaimable for use by applications and not "used" but temporarily used. Looking at the UI now it looks like all of my VMs are bumping up against the read-line but in reality they still have a good amount of available memory.

 

[rd67]

@dcsapak
couldn't pve know if the agent is intalled?
with the agent installed proxmox can detect the vm IPs, so i guess it could detect anything else inside the VM.
please make it work if the agent is installed.

 

[dcsapak]

@dcsapak
couldn't pve know if the agent is intalled?
with the agent installed proxmox can detect the vm IPs, so i guess it could detect anything else inside the VM.
please make it work if the agent is installed.

theoretically the guest agent could execute arbtrary commands in the guest. but since we don't actually know what kind of os/version/etc. runs in there producing a command that reliably reads out the memory info isn't an easy task

currently we use the info from the ballooning driver, but that sadly behaves a bit differently in different guest operating systems...