How much RAM do these domains require?

User Support
1

Ver: Qubes R4.1.1

I have a fairly good machine with 16 GB of RAM. However, Qubes IDLES at 13.6 GB! Here’s the breakdown of what percent of memory goes to each domain, as per xentools (all values rounded to 4 sig figs):

1 running domains, 6 blocked, 0 paused, 0 crashed, 0 dying, 0 shutdown

Dom0 = Mem: 4.177 GB (25.2%), Max Mem: 4.195 GB (25.3%)
Sys-Firewall = Mem: 4.079 GB (24.6%), Max Mem: 4.097 GB (24.7%)
Sys-net = Mem: 393.0 MB (2.4%), Max mem: 411.0 MB (2.5%)
Sys-net-dm = Mem: 148.0 MB (0.9%), Max mem: 149.0 MB (0.9%)
Sys-USB = Mem: 291.0 MB (1.8%), Max mem: 308.0 MB (1.9%)
Sys-USB-dm = Mem: 148.0 MB (0.9%), Max mem: 149.0 MB (0.9%)
Sys-whonix = Mem: 4.080 GB (24.6%), Max mem: 4.097 GB (24.7%)

The above figures are from after I started up the machine. Please note that a USB wifi receiver was assigned to sys-net during the time of these figures. Also note that the only other thing running on Qubes was xentools.

This is obscene. Why would these domains using so much memory? I don’t see any error messages that could indicate failures.

Since I want to run more than just the default domains, how do I minimize RAM use of sys-firewall and sys-whonix? Should I try cutting down the amount of RAM allocated to these?

Please note that I do want to use sys-whonix and sys-firewall, but I feel like this is just a bit excessive.

2

Well, I set my sys-whonix on 500MB, sys-firewall on 300MB and dom0 on 1536, while using zram with swap disabled.
What is preventing you to decrease amount of RAM to whatever level you’d think would be good?

3

As I’m having the same issue “QUBES Idles” at about 14GB.

Do those values worked well?

Quoted:

Well, I set my sys-whonix on 500MB, sys-firewall on 300MB and dom0 on 1536,

end of quote.

4

Xen will use all the memory, even if the qubes are idle.

If your standard max memory limited is 4 GB, each qube will get 4 GB as long as there are free memory, even if the qubes are idle. Once you run out of free memory, Xen will balance the memory between the qubes. You can see this happening with xentop, qubes that started with 4 GB memory will drop as you start more qubes.

1 Like
5

Can you give us xentop -f when RAM is on 14GB?

6

I did set the RAM to those values:

still not having any more any issue.