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richard6121
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vCenter 4.1 excessive memory usage

Hi all,

We have a fresh install (not upgraded) of 4.1 on 2008 R2.  Roughly 20 hosts and 70 VM's.  SQL is off-box, not local.  It's a VM.

At 4GB RAM, physical memory usage was 98% and while vCenter seemed to run OK, doing anything on the box was very slow as there would be excessive paging activity.  We bumped the RAM up to 6GB and it didn't help very much.  For the Tomcat config (Java tab), I set the max RAM to 768MB and it helped things a bit more.  I'm still seeing pysical RAM usage hover around 98% and a total commit charge of over 6GB.

Also, the NetApp vCenter console has been added to this installation.

Is this normal?

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Troy_Clavell
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I did just notice the VMware Update Manager has a Peak Working Set of  1GB with 47 million cumulative page faults -- Current working set is  only 43MB.  I wonder if this process is the bad actor on the stage.

I would keep an eye on this to see what is going on.  However, I don't believe you answered the question about limits.  Are there any resource limits set on the guest itself?

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Troy_Clavell
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vCenter is a VM? If so, have you confirmed there are no limits set?  Also, other than the NetApp vCenter console plugin, there is nothing else installed on this box? Nothing other than default roles and features?

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richard6121
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The VM resource settings are at the defaults.  Nothing else is installed.

Looking at taskmon and sorted by Commit Size, the top 4 processes are:

  • tomcat6.exe at 954MB
  • java.exe at 590MB
  • vpxd.exe at 253MB
  • java.exe at 220MB

It really doesn't look so bad from this perspective.

What's odd is that physical memory usage seems to oscillate very slowly with a period of 30-45 minutes or so.  It very slowly creeps up to 98%, stays a while, then very slowly slackens to about 70%.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  No sudden changes.

I did just notice the VMware Update Manager has a Peak Working Set of 1GB with 47 million cumulative page faults -- Current working set is only 43MB.  I wonder if this process is the bad actor on the stage.

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Troy_Clavell
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I did just notice the VMware Update Manager has a Peak Working Set of  1GB with 47 million cumulative page faults -- Current working set is  only 43MB.  I wonder if this process is the bad actor on the stage.

I would keep an eye on this to see what is going on.  However, I don't believe you answered the question about limits.  Are there any resource limits set on the guest itself?

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richard6121
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I did just find a memory limit and I removed it.  Let's see what happens.

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Troy_Clavell
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richardm wrote:

I did just find a memory limit and I removed it.  Let's see what happens.

good stuff!  That, in my opinion, may be the issue.

richard6121
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Solved!  😃

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