balloon driver retains memory causing guest vm memory performance
 

Hello all, I have a problem with Memory ballooning on one of my vm guest, these are the outpits i get from these commands, free -m

total used free shared buffers cached

Mem: 7982 7830 152 0 163 760

-/+ buffers/cache: 6906 1076

Swap: 4094 1112 2982


I have around 3.7G missing

vmware-toolbox-cmd stat balloon

3760 M

you can see, the missing memory is taken by VMWare Balloon Driver, I also checked the hard limit on the amount of host memory that the VM can use,

~]$ /usr/bin/vmware-toolbox-cmd stat memlimit

4096 MB



How do I get that memory space back and have the balloon driver release that space, thanks

First of all memory in use is memory well used. (well, OK, most of the time ;-p) That's because Linux uses a very efficient Virtual Memory Manager (VMM). So it's not "missing" and unless an application doesn't want to "give it back" assert it's used properly. (Well, OK, the VMware knowledge base lists some problems so do check if any apply to your setup.) If it's not then please provide a complete and properly formatted list of what's actually using memory.