Kevin Parker asked:
Can some one please help me understand this.
i am running kvm hosts with 5 vms on it.
These are ksm driver statistics
each page is 4KB
cat /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_shared 162221
cat /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_sharing 264281
cat /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_unshared 241483
Is “pages_sharing” total no of pages created by vms. and “pages_shared” is the number of pages that is found similar and merged together.
if that is true then why is pages_sharing-pages_shared != pages_unshared
264281-162221 != 241483
My answer:
pages_unshared means just what it says: the pages could not be shared because they’re unique.
pages_shared indicates how many pages are actually in use and being shared.
pages_sharing indicates how many pages the VMs think there are. If you didn’t have KSM running, this is how many pages would actually be in use.
So, in your example, 264281 pages have been found to be shareable, and so they were merged into 162221 pages, while 241483 pages were not shareable. KSM saved you about 398 MB of memory.
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