Reported in the community forum [0]. By default, there can be large
amounts of memory left assigned to the QEMU process after backup.
Likely because of fragmentation, it's necessary to explicitly call
malloc_trim() to tell glibc that it shouldn't keep all that memory
resident for the process.
QEMU itself already does a malloc_trim() in the RCU thread, but that
code path might not be reached (or not for a long time) under usual
operation. The value of 4 MiB for the argument was also copied from
there.
Example with the following configuration:
> agent: 1
> boot: order=scsi0
> cores: 4
> cpu: x86-64-v2-AES
> ide2: none,media=cdrom
> memory: 1024
> name: backup-mem
> net0: virtio=DA:58:18:26:59:9F,bridge=vmbr0,firewall=1
> numa: 0
> ostype: l26
> scsi0: rbd:base-107-disk-0/vm-106-disk-1,size=4302M
> scsihw: virtio-scsi-pci
> smbios1: uuid=b2d4511e-8d01-44f1-afd6-9581b30c24a6
> sockets: 2
> startup: order=2
> virtio0: lvmthin:vm-106-disk-1,iothread=1,size=1G
> virtio1: lvmthin:vm-106-disk-2,iothread=1,size=1G
> virtio2: lvmthin:vm-106-disk-3,iothread=1,size=1G
> vmgenid: 0a1d8751-5e02-449d-977e-c0160e900231
Before the change:
> root@pve8a1 ~ # grep VmRSS /proc/$(cat /var/run/qemu-server/106.pid)/status
> VmRSS: 370948 kB
> root@pve8a1 ~ # vzdump 106 --storage pbs
> (...)
> INFO: Backup job finished successfully
> root@pve8a1 ~ # grep VmRSS /proc/$(cat /var/run/qemu-server/106.pid)/status
> VmRSS: 2114964 kB
After the change:
> root@pve8a1 ~ # grep VmRSS /proc/$(cat /var/run/qemu-server/106.pid)/status
> VmRSS: 398788 kB
> root@pve8a1 ~ # vzdump 106 --storage pbs
> (...)
> INFO: Backup job finished successfully
> root@pve8a1 ~ # grep VmRSS /proc/$(cat /var/run/qemu-server/106.pid)/status
> VmRSS: 424356 kB
[0]: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/131339/
Co-diagnosed-by: Friedrich Weber <f.weber@proxmox.com>
Co-diagnosed-by: Dominik Csapak <d.csapak@proxmox.com>
Signed-off-by: Fiona Ebner <f.ebner@proxmox.com>
Acked-by: Wolfgang Bumiller <w.bumiller@proxmox.com>
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