I appreciate the extremely fast response, but I think it was made too hastily and without much detail. Yes I have looked through these documents. My understanding is that the balloon driver is used to swap some of the "least used" (but actually used) guest memory pages. This does not seem to apply here because this memory is actually "Free" on the guest, it should not need to be swapped. If the balloon driver also is there to allow a host to reclaim "Free" memory, then why is this memory not being reclaimed by the balloon driver if it has been consistently free for so long? The TPS feature also does not seem relevant here, because if anything, it would reduce the host memory usage, not explain why the host memory usage is actually so much higher.
