Low memory, starting machines & assigning devices

[johny...@sigaint.org]

Hi, Qubers:

Wonder if someone could tell me if this is normal/expected behaviour.
(3.2rc3):

If I have a few AppVM's running, at some point, the manager will refuse to
start any more VM's, complaining about low memory. Similarly, assigning
devices to running VM's will fail. (Most annoying.)

However, if I close a few apps in the VM's (a big Firefox or two will
typically do it), then I'm able to fire up a new VM & assign devices to
the running ones, and am THEN able to relaunch the memory-hungry app/apps
in the existing running VM's with no problem.

(Typically at this point, swap is used a bit in dom0 and sometimes the
VM's, but things still work. Swap being required to hold the new
situation may be the distinguishing factor...?)

The fact app-close -> start-another-vm -> app-restart works while simply
starting the start-another-vm fails, seems a bit odd to me.

In fact, I've modified my habits when using Qubes to fire up all the
AppVM's I might need, right at boot time, so I won't have trouble starting
them later when apps are running. That just doesn't seem right, and
having to restart apps can cause bottlenecks in one's workflow.

Thoughts? Anything further I can check to help track down the reason for
this? Anything I can do memwriter/mem-balancing wise to help things?

Thanks.

JJ

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

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qmemman / meminfo-writer setup things to avoid swap usage, this is
intentional. How it works is documented here:
https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/qmemman/

If you really want to change this, try /etc/qubes/qmemman.conf -
especially cache-margin-factor. You can try setting it to something less
than 1.0. But don't be surprised by some out of memory errors later...

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
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[pleo...@gmail.com]

Changing default memory assign values for dom0 and appVM may also help.Default value for that is up 4GB which is huge amount of RAM and it work corectly on 1 GB or lower.