Memory issue

[thefift...@nym.hush.com]

The quick:

Dom0 Task Manager shows memory usage percent as always increasing. Closing Virtual Machines does not seem to free up any memory by displayed memory usage percent.

The questions:

Are there any advice on what I should do with this situation?

Should I clean out Qubes memory buffer/catch? If so, what safe command should be used?

Or, if that isn’t the issue, what should I look for? What more information do you good elves need to help the issue?

The slow:

I noticed this situation a good week ago when I looked at Dom0 task manager. It showed my memory usage to be around 95%, that is a lot. The computers total memory capacity is 32gig. My normal memory usage tend to be around 35-40%, a fairly steady level measured over long time. After seeing my memory maxing out I attempted to close down one virtual machine after the other, but it did not appear to make any difference in terms of freeing up memory. So I decided to restart my computer and that made everything back to normal—for a little while. Starting my normal virtual machines and got to the normal memory usage level. But then it just kept adding on, a disposable machine opened and closed and the memory usage increased, another virtual machine opened and the memory increased, closing it did not affect the memory level. And so it kept adding on more and more memory usage as I did my normal computing things like browsing and so on. In writing moment I’ve reached 93% of memory capacity.

The extra:

Please, treat me as a newbie. Although I’ve been using Qubes OS for several years (its pretty cool operating system, thank you creators and maintainers <3) without being knowledgeable about command line interface (avoiding it when possible), I remain a GUI person and don’t really want a cure for it.

Thank you for your time.

[unman]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 08:10:42PM +0000, thefifthseason via qubes-users wrote:
>
>
> The quick:
>
> Dom0 Task Manager shows memory usage percent as always increasing.
> Closing Virtual Machines does not seem to free up any memory by
> displayed memory usage percent.
>
> The questions:
>
> Are there any advice on what I should do with this situation?Should
> I clean out Qubes memory buffer/catch? If so, what safe command should

> be used?Or, if that isn???t the issue, what should I look for? What

> more information do you good elves need to help the issue?
>
> The slow:
>
> I noticed this situation a good week ago when I looked at Dom0 task
> manager. It showed my memory usage to be around 95%, that is a lot.
> The computers total memory capacity is 32gig. My normal memory usage
> tend to be around 35-40%, a fairly steady level measured over long
> time. After seeing my memory maxing out I attempted to close down one
> virtual machine after the other, but it did not appear to make any
> difference in terms of freeing up memory. So I decided to restart my

> computer and that made everything back to normal???for a little while.

> Starting my normal virtual machines and got to the normal memory usage
> level. But then it just kept adding on, a disposable machine opened
> and closed and the memory usage increased, another virtual machine
> opened and the memory increased, closing it did not affect the memory
> level. And so it kept adding on more and more memory usage as I did my
> normal computing things like browsing and so on. In writing moment

> I???ve reached 93% of memory capacity.
>
> The extra:
>
> Please, treat me as a newbie. Although I???ve been using Qubes OS

> for several years (its pretty cool operating system, thank you
> creators and maintainers
>

I'm not sure what "Dom0 task manager" is, and what it shows.
But the memory allocated to dom0 is only *part* of the available
memory, and can be constrained further using boot parameters :
dom0_mem=max:...

The memory allocated to Virtual machines is from a separate pool - this
is why closing qubes does not free up memory in dom0.
Of your 32GB, the default would be to have 4GB allocated to dom0 (this
can easily be reduced to 2048 or 1536), with the balance of 28GB pooled
between the open qubes.

I'm not sure why you are now seeing dom0 usage up from previous levels
-unless you can associate this with difficulties in running Qubes I
wouldnt worry about some notional 95% figure.

It's possible I am misinterpreting your mail. If so, perhaps you could
explain exactly what effect this has on your Qubes experience.

[donoban]

Are you running KDE? Do you have swap enabled on dom0? A 'free -h'
output shows this.

I noticed a possible memory leak some time ago and I use KDE. In my
case, I see the Swap memory usage slowly growing. At this moment, with
just 5 days uptime I have 657M of used swap. I remember it reaching some
gigabytes.

I determined that after some says of uptime, the X process was using
more memory compared to fresh boot. But not really too much for have so
much memory swapped.

[Ulrich Windl]

On 3/12/21 9:10 PM, thefifthseason via qubes-users wrote:

> The quick:
>
> Dom0 Task Manager shows memory usage percent as always increasing.
> Closing Virtual Machines does not seem to free up any memory by
> displayed memory usage percent.

Could it be you are confused with "used" vs. "free" ignoring cache and
buffers? Usually Linux minimizes "free" that is unused memory.

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[donoban]

On 3/13/21 6:28 PM, thefift...@nym.hush.com wrote:
> "Are you running KDE? Do you have swap enabled on dom0?"
>
>

> I am using Qubes 4 which uses XFCE desktop environment as default,
> haven't changed it.
>
> With the command "free -h" in dom0 it shows this:
>
> mem: total 3.7g, used 554m, free 188m, shared 8.0m, buff/cache 3.0g,
> available 318m
>
> swap: total 15g, used 671m, free 14g
>
>
> It looks like dom0 is making excellent use of the buffer/cache, why
> should it need to store so much temporary data?
>
> And should I do something about it?

I would say that your available (which should have a high % of the
buff/cache) is very low. Here are my stats running KDE (with many
workspaces and qubes running) and near 6days uptime:

[user@dom0 ~]$ free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available

Mem: 3.6G 1.5G 192M 58M 1.9G 1.5G

Swap: 7.3G 725M 6.6G

I have less buff/cache than you but more available. I have no idea about
what could be happening.