Increasing memory compression buffer

[wobbe98]

I need a bit of advise.

On my server baloon memory is almost as high as active memory.

So now I'm wondering if increasing the memory compression buffer is a good idea.

Have look at the screenshot and tell me what you guys think.

[J1mbo]

Can we see the colour code for the third graph (memory usage past hour)?

Do you have memory limits defined (either directly or via resource pools)?

[wobbe98]

Sure, how stupid of me. Here's another screenshot with the legend.

And to answer your question: A few VM's have a memory reservation, but that reservation is much lower than their max memory. And there are no limits set to any VM.

[J1mbo]

It's probably worth a go.  I wrote this a while back (here),

I was expecting RAM compression to help a bit, but was surprised by how  much.  RAM compression consistently reduced the swap rate by well over  half with my ‘keen’ settings, but did seem to slow things down quite a  bit too:

mem.MemZipAllocPct – 50
mem.MemZipLowMemMaxSwapOut – 50
mem.MemZipBalloonXferPct – 30
mem.MemZipMaxRejectionPct – 10
mem.MemSwapSkipPct – 75

Tweaking MemZipAllocPct and MemZipLowMemMaxSwapOut to 25% seems to  provide a happy balance of swap and RAM compression throughputs.

On the other hand, since balloon only seems to be recovering 2GB out of 24GB in your host, perhaps it is possible to reduce the allocated RAM just a little on each VM and side-step the issue?