Memory reclamation with balloon driver in CentOS 6

[Seonet]

Hi,

I have problem with memory reclamation. See output of free bellow. What I muset set to faster reclamation balloon memory to host? It is LAMP server.

 
[root@wh01 ~]# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         16005       9962       6042          0         68         65
-/+ buffers/cache:       9828       6176
Swap:         1999          0       1999

Thanks a lot.

Pavel

[chriswahl]

The balloon driver is invoked when there is memory contension on the host.

Per this article:

http://blogs.vmware.com/kb/2011/03/a-beginners-guide-to-memory-reclamation-in-esxesxi.html

There are four different states namely, high, soft, hard and low. Page sharing is enabled by default. The memory state in which the host state is in determines if swapping or ballooning is to be employed.

In the high state no reclamation techniques are employed unless there is a virtual machine memory limit configured. In the soft state, ballooning is employed. In the hard state, both ballooning and swapping is used. During swapping, memory compression is also activated. In the low state, in addition to employing all memory reclamation techniques, execution of all virtual machines that consume more memory than their target memory allocations is blocked.

[rickardnobel]

Raj wrote:

I have problem with memory reclamation. See output of free bellow. What I muset set to faster reclamation balloon memory to host?

Could you describe some more what the actual problem is that you see?