virtio_balloon
For the past 20 days, I’ve been working with servers for the first time in my life...
I set up servers on Tierhive, Hetzner, and Oracle, and I didn't encounter any issues regarding free RAM metrics on any of them.
At another company, I encountered a high-performance server equipped with a Ryzen 9950 processor for the first time.
However, `virtio_balloon` was running and causing a RAM bottleneck (Total: 4 GB RAM, Used: 2.8 GB).
With help from Gemini, I blacklisted and disabled this software (at the time, I assumed it was a program Ubuntu ran for swap space and that disabling it would solve the issue).
It turned out the hosting company was reclaiming that RAM to manage the virtualization load.
After blacklisting and disabling the program, RAM usage dropped to just 400 MB.
Since the server is sold as a VDS, could the hosting company view disabling the "balloon" feature as a breach of contract?
Would it cause problems if I temporarily disabled it during emergencies where I'm getting memory errors or encountering "Killed" signals?
Or should I keep looking for a server elsewhere?