[SOLVED] Windows 11 consuming ungodly amount of ram

[cshill]

Hi Folks,
I am testing Windows 11 compatibility on Proxmox and it was running fine the other day but I had it on an old Acer Veriton that I started off on. It worked fine but I'm moving VMs and data over to older server models, in particular a PowerEdge R420. I noticed that everything is working but the memory consumption on Windows 11 via Proxmox summary menu is claiming it's very high. I started it at 2 cores and 4gb of ram and I knew that would be low but I was just moving stuff around. Now that it's settled on the server I want I upped it to 8GB of ram and it shot up to consume over 90% of the ram. I'm a bit bewildered as I wasn't doing anything on it but the server ram is older and on 1333Mhz that I thought maybe it's just chugging these old memory modules. I upped it to 16gb of ram, same thing, now 24gb of ram, same thing.





I also have a photo of running htop within the proxmox server's shell when Windows 11 was on 24gb of ram.


Here's a photo inside Windows 11 and it shows that only 2gb of ram is being consumed by the actual VM so I have no idea what the Proxmox node is doing with that left over ram.

 

[justinclift]

The first thing that jumps out for me is the screenshot of the Proxmox interface piece there showing "No Guest Agent configured", which probably means you don't have the QEMU Guest Agent installed. I'd get that sorted out first.

It's a separate executable that's in the VirtIO ISO. It should be in the base directory of that ISO.

When that's installed, you'll need to go into the Proxmox "Options" tab for the VM and enable the QEMU guest agent option so it starts the next time the VM boots.

Oh, on that note.. are you using the VirtIO drivers for everything in your Windows VM? eg VirtIO storage, VirtIO network card, etc.

I think there's a VirtIO ballooning device thing automatically available for windows, which would probably be useful in your situation too.

 

[cshill]

The first thing that jumps out for ms is the screenshot of the Proxmox interface piece there is showing "No Guest Agent configured", which probably means you don't have the QEMU Guest Agent installed. I'd get that sorted out first.

I'll take a look at the guest agent. I have other OS's but not sure what this guest agent does.

It's a separate executable that's in the VirtIO ISO.

Does Proxmox come with that because I didn't see one. I guess I can find it.

Oh, on that note.. are you using the VirtIO drivers for everything in your Windows VM? eg VirtIO storage, VirtIO network card, etc.

From what I read there were some complaints about VirtIO and to use the vmware versions instead.

I think there's a VirtIO ballooning device thing automatically available for windows, which would probably be useful in your situation.

There's a ballooning option for cpu and ram but I thought I should keep it on incase the system needs a little extra it can take it.

- I also set the minimum ram usage to 2gb and max to 8gb. It doesn't seem what I set, the ram consumption maxes to 90-93%.

 

[justinclift]

VirtIO ISO, suitable for Win 11. This is the official source:

https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/stable-virtio/virtio-win.iso

The Proxmox wiki has a page about it:

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Windows_VirtIO_Drivers

The Proxmox GUI has an option for including that ISO when you're going through the "Create vm" wizard thing.

From what I read there were some complaints about VirtIO and to use the vmware versions instead.

Ahh. I've not seen the complaints, so I'm not real sure about them. I've personally used virtio drivers with (non-windows) things for years without any substantial issues.

From that, I'd recommend starting with them (best possible performance after all) and seeing how you go. If you do hit any weird issues with them though, then post about it here for people to investigate?

I also set the minimum ram usage to 2gb and max to 8gb

Yeah, it seems like the VM is wanting to use the ram for "something", so Proxmox is giving it all it's asking for (up to the max value you set).

 

[LnxBil]

Yeah, it seems like the VM is wanting to use the ram for "something", so Proxmox is giving it all it's asking for (up to the max value you set).

That is how each OS works ... please search the forums for this exact question. It is asked at least once a week.

TLDR: Windows is lying about its RAM usage and every OS uses per default 99% of the available memory for caching, so that it IS ACTUALLY in use from the view of the hypervisor. If you don't want this high RAM usage, give the VM less RAM.

 

[justinclift]

@cshill This video should help, it seems like exactly the right thing to fix the memory reporting problem.

 

[cshill]

Just so people here know, The virtio drivers are necessary to the operating system of Windows 11 on Proxmox. Once the VirtIO drivers were installed Proxmox is no longer reporting weird memory issues.

The problem is the ballooning feature, AKA dynamic memory. This is directly linked to a VirtIO driver that has to be installed for it to work effectively.
Proxmox Link This link will send you to the Dynamic Memory section of Proxmox's manual and it states that Windows systems DO NOT have the ballooning driver built in. This is why it will say 95% in use when windows task manager states 2GB of ram. The linux distributions by default have it when you install the OS and or run apt update.

 

[justinclift]

As a general data point, it's probably worth just defaulting your Windows installs to use all the VirtIO drivers (disk, network, etc) unless there's a specific reason to choose something different.

VirtIO is the officially blessed (virtualisation) drivers by the KVM project, and the people working on them tend to communicate with each other and sometimes are in the same teams at their employer(s).