The situation is a bit confusing: htop inside the VM shows ~32 GB RAM usage, but Unraid reports almost 70 GB.

Why is there such a big difference?

The VM does have a large RAM allocation, but reducing it isn’t really an option. Does anyone know what could be causing the VM to appear to consume so much memory on the host side? This is the only VM running on the server.

Output of free -h

user@jacaranda-vm:~$ free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            89Gi        33Gi        21Gi        33Mi        34Gi        55Gi
Swap:          8,0Gi          0B       8,0Gi

Edited September 18, 2025Sep 18 by Plexi09

On 9/18/2025 at 4:07 PM, Plexi09 said:

Does anyone know what could be causing the VM to appear to consume so much memory on the host side? This is the only VM running on the server.

it does take as much you set it should in your VM setting, sample

will take 8 GB from Host as soon its running, nevermind if its using 1, 3, 7 ... inside the VM.

depening on your VM and setting, sample ballooning (initial lower then max) will behave "from / to", but is for windows as sample not recommended, and a linux also will prolly start using cache inside and ballon up to max.

so may check your setup here and think about if your VM really needs that much RAM.