pfSense on Proxmox - High RAM Usage

kevdog

Hmm I know this thread is old however I was provisioning my Proxmox pfSense VM with 8Gb of RAM. Once provisioned it consistently used 6.71 Gb of RAM as reported by the Proxmox Summary page on the VM.

I followed the advice of this thread and made a balloon.conf file within /boot/loader.conf.d and added the following:

virtio_load="YES"
virtio_pci_load="YES"
virtio_balloon_load="YES"

I rebooted and then I confirmed and got a similar dmesg with dmesg | grep virt

The VM memory listed for the pfSense VM is listed at 8192 mb with ballooning activated.

After reboot I waited about 10 minutes for steady state however notice no difference in RAM usage as reported by proxmox with 6.71/8Gb RAM still being used by pfSense as located in the promxmox summary screen for pfsense.

Soooo -- long story short -- after applying what was very well documented in this thread -- nothing changed.

KOM

@kevdog If you're using ZFS then it might be the ZFS cache. 8G seems like a lot for pfSense btw unless you're running every service under the Sun.