On 05/20/2017 10:51 AM, Gaiko Kyofusho wrote: > I have a 16gb mem system which can't be upgraded any further to my > knwoledge. I had thought this would be enough but I am running into > memory errors more often than I would like. I admittedly open maybe > 7-12 appvms so the obvious answer to my prob might be open less appvms > but for my workflow that would be inconvient. I do not remember > setting up a swap space during setup but I think it was set up > automatically though in the dom0 system monitor plugin the swap space > monitor never seems to move (stays at zero). > > My questions are two fold I guess: > > 1. Are there any recomended ways for reducing memory usage? > 2. How can I tell if swap is being used? > 3. If swap is not being used how can I enable it? > I only have 8 GB of RAM and it can handle about 7-12 VMs, depending on what I'm doing. But I tweaked my VM memory settings; leaving it to the defaults makes it hard to run more than 4-5 VMs at the same time since new ones won't start up because of a lack of RAM.
The first thing you can do is reduce the max amount of memory the AppVMs use. By default, they're set to use between 400-4000 MB of RAM, but if you look at your actual VM RAM usage in a terminal window by using the top or free commands, you may find that your actual usage is a lot less and can reduce that upper limit to something like 2000 MB or less. That includes your service VMs like your firewall; you can probably reduce the upper limit on sys-firewall to 300-400 MB rather than the 4000 MB it's set to by default. Or if you don't go crazy with various iptables firewall rules, you can run the qubes-mirage-firewall from here as a replacement to sys-firewall: https://github.com/talex5/qubes-mirage-firewall I have mine running with only 32MB of RAM and things work fine (there's a hack you may need to do to get DispVMs to connect to the internet properly though, but regular VMs work fine with it). Next thing to look at is the RAM allocated to dom0. By default, the upper limit is 4096 MB but I reduced mine to 2048 MB and haven't encountered any noticeable issues. In order to change it though, you have to edit your GRUB config files and then reboot. Edit /etc/default/grub in dom0 and change the dom0_mem=min and dom0_mem=max values to match your needs. I set mine to 1024 and 2048 respectively, but you might be able to go even lower (say 512 and 1536 or something like that). Then, you'd need to regenerate /boot/grub2/grub.cfg to get it to work permanently. I don't remember the command off the top of my head, but you alternatively, you can edit that file directly making the changes to all references of dom0 max and min memory like you did with the previous file, save it, and it'll still work once you reboot. If you make those changes, that should help. There's no magic bullet as to what to set those max memory settings to since it really depends on how you use your VMs, so you may have to do a bit of profiling first to figure out what your optimal max RAM values are for each case. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to qubes-users@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/ofpt90%24njc%241%40blaine.gmane.org. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
