I often spin up a bunch of VMs for different reasons when doing dev work and unfortunately, as awesome as my little mini-itx Ryzen 9 dev box is, it only has 32GB RAM. Kernel Samepage Merging (KSM) definitely helps, however when I have half a dozens or so VMs running and chewing up RAM, the Kernel’s Out Of Memory (OOM) killer will start executing them, like this.
[171242.719512] oom-kill:constraint=CONSTRAINT_NONE,nodemask=(null),cpuset=/,mems_allowed=0,global_oom,task_memcg=/machine.slice/machine-qemu\x2d435\x2dtest\x2dvm\x2dcentos\x2d7\x2d00.scope,task=qemu-system-x86,pid=2785515,uid=107
[171242.719536] Out of memory: Killed process 2785515 (qemu-system-x86) total-vm:22450012kB, anon-rss:5177368kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:0kB
[171242.887700] oom_reaper: reaped process 2785515 (qemu-system-x86), now anon-rss:0kB, file-rss:68kB, shmem-rss:0kB
If I had more slots available (which I don’t) I could add more RAM, but that’s actually pretty expensive, plus I really like the little form factor. So, given it’s just dev work, a relatively cheap alternative is to buy an NVMe drive and add a swap file to it (or dedicate the whole drive). This is what I’ve done on my little dev box (actually I bought it with an NVMe drive so adding the swapfile came for free).
Of course the number of VMs you can run depends on the amount of RAM each VM actually needs for what you’re running on it. But whether I’m running 100 small VMs or 10 large ones, it doesn’t matter.
To demonstrate this, I spin up a bunch of CentOS 7 VMs at the same time and upgrade all packages. Without swap I could comfortably run half a dozen VMs, but more than that and they would start getting killed. With 100GB swap file I am able to get about 40 going!
Even with pages swapping in and out, I haven’t really noticed any performance decrease and there is negligible CPU time wasted waiting on disk I/O when using the machines normally.
The main advantage for me is that I can keep lots of VMs around (or spin up dozens) in order to test things, without having to juggle active VMs or hoping they won’t actually use their memory and have the kernel start killing my VMs. It’s not as seamless as extra RAM would be, but that’s expensive and I don’t have the slots for it anyway, so this seems like a good compromise.
4 thoughts on “Use swap on NVMe to run more dev KVM guests, for when you run out of RAM”
I thnik good idea is to swap on GPU memory, if we won’t play game. This configuration should been the default, but it should been integrated with Game Mode Library, so when we playing game, fast GPU memory will be moved to slower hard drive made swap.
Chris: Are you tracking wear on the NVMe? Anything emerging?
Hey Brad! A good question and no, I am not tracking anything yet… Would be good to see, although I think SSDs are getting pretty good at managing that these days. With the Samsung ones you can use a tool to increase the amount of reserved space which can help to make it faster and also last longer. Obviously RAM is the best option, but NVMe was a quick and dirty win!
This is a good read about SSD endurance https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/