Thank you for your patience with me, everyone. 
I really appreciate it a lot. I hope you all are having a peaceful day!
I probably need to correct myself. Am I right to say that the Qubes Domains tool at the top right shows how much memory currently is allocated to each running VM, but does not give (much) information about how much memory each of those VMs actually currently needs?
So if for example the Qubes Domains tool shows that a given VM currently has e.g. 600 MB allocated, all I can derive from that is that either a) that VM is not currently needing more than 600 MB or b) 600 MB is the maximum that Qubes is currently able to allocate to that VM due to the need to balance memory between all running VMs.
Is that correct?
If so, how / where can I find out how much RAM a given VM would take / need if there were more available?
Or is the only way to find out if a VM would need more RAM by observing its behaviour and watching whether it runs well or not?
I can keep pasting the map without the application crashing.
Iām running it on a 12900K, the vm has 2 GB memory, and it was using around 1 GB.
You can use the command free -h in the terminal to see the memory usage.
Thank you! That sounds positive.
Do you think the processor makes a major difference here?
Free -h shows 430 Mi used.
But it also shows 316 Mi swap!
If itās using swap that would explain the constant accessing of the SSD, even when Iām not saving files and no automatic backup process of Freeplane is running (I disabled it for now).
Why would it use swap though?
As best as I can see, there seem to be three issues here:
- Freeplane is constantly very briefly accessing the SSD
Why is Freeplane constantly accessing the SSD? The hard drive light of the laptop blips for a fraction of a second at almost every single little input I make. With the exception of typing letters into map branches, every hover on a menu item, every highlighting of a branch etc make the hard drive light blip. Is this normal, and I just never saw it on the X200 because SSD access was so fast there that I didnāt see the light come on? Why would Freeplane do that though?
- Freeplane is periodically accessing SSD for about 15 seconds and freezes
Why does Freeplane seem to periodically access the SSD every few minutes for about 15 seconds when Iām not saving any mindmap and no auto save is going on either, freezing the app during that time?
- Saving Freeplane files is insanely slow and freezes as well
Why is access to the SSD so insanely slow for Freeplane? This is exclusively a problem with Freeplane: I tested saving a 40 MB text file, that took ten seconds. Saving a 40 MB mindmap takes a full two minutes, during which the app is frozen. For reference, on the X200 on Mint, saving Freeplane files of the same size took under a second or thereabouts, on this exact same SSD.
I donāt know if these are distinct separate problems, or different manifestations of the same problem. I would love to find out.
Free -h also shows total memory to be only 544 Mi for the Freeplane AppVM.
I donāt understand why that is, since initial memory is set to 600, and max memory is set to 6000 MB.
Unless this has something to do with it:
I just noticed that max memory is set to 6000 in the Freeplane template VM. But when I check in the Freplane AppVM, while max memory also reads 6000, that is greyed out.
Why is that, and does this mean itās stuck at 600, the initial memory setting? Or does it being greyed out just mean it canāt be altered in the AppVM, only in the template VM?
One more test:
Even if I shut down all VMs except dom0 and the Freeplane AppVM (which Qubes Domains then reports to have allocated exactly 4080 and 600 MB of memory to), nothing changes at all.
To me this seems to suggest that the Freeplane freezing issue doesnāt have to do with the amount of physically installed RAM - since in this test, only 4.68 GB of the existing 16 GB RAM are actually being used.
It looks to me like thereās plenty of unused RAM, but Freeplane isnāt able to access it for some reason - and thus writes every little thing I do in Freeplane into swap on the disk - which for some (second?) reason also is extremely slow.
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- SOLVED * * * * *
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So through following one little clue after another I finally found the culprit, and it wasā¦ me myself. Good old fashioned user error, plus a dose of not seeing the forest for all the trees. Mea culpaā¦
I almost donāt want to tell you what it was because itās such a stupid mistake to hang me up for days and keep you busy trying to help me figure out what I did wrong. But ok here it is:
In the settings of the Freeplane AppVM, I had selected 600 MB of initial memory, and 6000 GB of maximum memoryā¦ except that for some reason I had unchecked the box āinclude in memory balancingā.
I can not remember why I did that, I must have been trying something out there fairly early on, forgot to undo it, and never noticed that the tick was missing any time after, until just now.
The way I understand it this has led to the Freeplane AppVM being capped at the 600 MB that I had set for initial memory.
That was clearly not enough at all, so Freeplane had no other choice but to constantly do everything in swap on the SSD.
Sooo I have now set initial memory to 2000 MB and max memory at 80000 MB (because I have now observed that those numbers work well for Freeplane with my large mindmaps), and tadaa - Freeplane starts up and loads six different large mindmaps very quickly, there are no more freezes nor any sluggishness anymore, and even saving mindmaps now happens in under a second again!
I feel really stupid right now. Iām so sorry all of you that I didnāt notice this sooner!
I will pay it forward, promise.
I now believe that Qubes can actually really, truly work for me as a daily driver. This means that I will keep using it and learn more about it, and sooner or later I will inevitably start helping others to switch to Qubes. Itās the least I can do for all your efforts and patience.
Iām sure I will pop back into the forums now and then both to see if I can maybe help out a little bit anywhere with the few specific things that I may have some experience with - like X230 related matters, for example - and probably also with my own questions again now and then.
But the big killer deal breaker issue seems to be really solved now, and I canāt tell you how happy I am about that. I would have shed a few tears if I would not have been able to use Qubes, for so many reasons.
TLDR: I made a silly mistake, it took me ages to notice, the issue is solved now, and I am super super grateful for all of your support that got me here!
I hope you have a wonderful day (and if not, that youāll kick butt anyway)!
Catch you another time again 
1 Like
I wanted to mark several of your answers as the solution, but apparently I can only select one, sorry! That doesnāt quite reflect your help though because a number of your answers together led me to the solution, and you helped me solve more than one thing in this thread as well. Just letting you know that I appreciate you all.
Good you solved problem.
With that out of the way I hope you find Qubes productive and worthwhile
for you.
Enjoy