Memory use in HA doesn't match with memory use in Proxmox

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

Hi,

first of all, I’m not sure if this is the correct category for this post.

I run a HA OS in a Proxmox machine, and HA shows a memory use of ~1GB:

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But, my summary at Proxmox for the HA machine shows a memory use of ~2GB:

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Shouldn’t these two memory use indicators be the same, or at least similar?

Thanks.

2

Interesting observation. I have a similar setup and a similar finding: In the Proxmox VM overview the mem utilization is shown as 3.7GB and within HA hardware view it’s only 2.3GB… Don’t know why there’s a difference.

3

No, they should not be the same.
Inside the VM memory is used by programs running “on” the VM.
Outside the VM memory is used to hold the memory of the inside VM and also to hold the memory used to emulate the VM.

4

Well, then I wouldn’t expect that on both ends it shows me a total of 4GB (as specified when I created that VM)… If that’s the case I guess it’s a fault on proxmox side, when they show the “memory used to emulate the VM” as part of the whole memory reserved for the VM guest OS.

5

I have not looked that much into proxmox, but then maybe the guest VM reserved the memory, which proxmox then will see as used, but inside the VM it is still free.

6

Probably used (and available) VS free (and available).

www.linuxatemyram.com

7

I guess that Proxmox shows the memory usage including the cache.

When I use “top” on debian I get something like this:

MiB Mem :   2048.0 total,   1522.3 free,    423.2 used,    102.5 buff/cache     
MiB Swap:   1024.0 total,   1022.8 free,      1.2 used.   1624.8 avail Mem

As the above is a container, proxmox shows a usage of about 423MB.

However when the system is a VM, proxmox does not know alot about how it uses memory.
For instance, this is also the case with an OPNsense VM on Proxmox:
https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=33969.0

8

Oh my god

I truly am a little newbie about linux. Much thanks.

9

Apparently it’s possible to install the QEMU Guest Agent in the home-assistant OS. After enabling it in the options of the VM, Proxmox should get more precise information.

I did this with my OPNsense VM and Proxmox has more info.

However, with regards to HAOS, I am not sure if it’s worth it - I guess that on each Supervisor update it will be required to reinstall the QEMU Guest Agent.

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10

QEMU Agent is included as a preinstalled component in Home Assistant OS.

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