RAM dashboard vs vm

[Egaria]

Good morning,

I don't understand why there is a difference in display on the RAM between the dashboard and directly on the VM
If anyone can tell me please


Thanks

 

[jazini110]

Hi,
the ram usage by the VM is 580M and there is some cache usage on VM, pve shows sum of them.

EDIT: there is some workaround to show it correctly, you can enable "Qemu guest agent" in the VM Options and then install qemu-guest-agent package in OS of that VM. (this works only for windows VMs)

 

[Dunuin]

Please use the forums search function. This is asked and explained every week. It's even that much asked that there are dedicated websites just to explain it: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

Whats shown there as 580M/9,49G is the "available" RAM which is something different than "free" RAM. Have a look at that "Mem" bar. The whole bar, including the yellow segments, is what the VM is actually using. So accoring to that bar it should be something like 80% RAM utilization which fits to the 78% that PVE is showing in the webUI.

This bascially shows the same:

Your VM got only 2.1G of free RAM but at the same time got 9G of available RAM, as ~7-8GB of that RAM is used for caching but could be freed up by the guest (but not by the PVE host) when needed. So your guest OS got 9G RAM available for programms for usage but at the same time that VM is consuming 8G (+X MB overhead) of real physical RAM.

Run free -h inside the VM. Everything that is not shown there as "free" is actually RAM that is somehow in use.

there is some workaround to show it correctly, you can enable "Qemu guest agent" in the VM Options and then install qemu-guest-agent package in OS of that VM.

Only when using Windows as a guest OS.