VirtIO Ballooning Memory Leak

[Mehiller]

Proxmox 2.3-13
Guest OS: MS Windows Server 2012 Standard x64
KVM64, 2 sockets, 4 cores (total 8 cores)

Ballooning driver and service was installed as said in Wiki. But right after start of guest system, process "System" begins to use about 14% of CPU time.
Sysinternals Process Explorer says that it is "Balloon.sys" thread uses so much CPU time.

While Balloon service is running and "VirtIO Ballooning device" is connected, memory is leaking (all 6 GB in about 20 minutes). It stop leaking only after shutting down service and disconnecting of "Device". After disconnecting, all leaked memory again becomes free.

Can anyone help me?

 

[ebiss]

What is your Balloon.sys version ?

 

[Mehiller]

What is your Balloon.sys version ?

At first, I tried 0.1.52 (stable) VirtIo drivers, then I removed Balooning service, removed 52 drivers and tried 65 version(latest). Both have this problem.

 

[tom]

not sure if its related, but you run the outdated 2.3? upgrade to latest stable first (3.x).

 

[spirit]

Note that it's possible that balloon driver use cpu to shrink the memory.

Windows fill all the memory at boot with zero, so balloon need to shrink it.
(Linux don't have this problem)

(example : you boot with max 16GB, and balloon target 2GB, it will use a lot of cpu to shrink it to 2GB).