Disabling services to reduce memory footprint

[lukekenny]

I am running Veeam 11 Community as a learning exercise in my home lab, backing up 5 vSphere VM's (which don't do a lot) and 4 desktops, which are our personal computers. The backups seem to run quickly, and the way backups are deduped and compressed is very impressive.

Veeam is running on an VM on an Intel NUC, with an i5 processor and 16GB RAM with an m.2 SSD. The Veeam VM is limited to 8GB RAM and has free reign of the CPU.

What doesn't work well is loading the console. After the VM has been running for a few days, it takes minutes, longer each day to appear. When it comes up, it's fine.

Obviously the VM is running with less than the desired amount of memory. In this case, backing up to a NFS share on a NAS, I don't need much of the advanced functionality turned on - not using tape, not using cloud, not using enterprise storage systems. There are quite a few services running, consuming RAM, that I feel will never be used. For example, Veeam.Azure.PlatformSvc.exe is taking 37MB of RAM, Veeam.Backup.CloudService.exe is using 66MB RAM. Veeam.CloudBackup.PlatformService.exe takes another 73MB of RAM.

Is there a way to identify and disable unused services, or at least a way to only start services when they are required? As the system is memory bound, I feel anything I can do to reduce the memory footprint would be helpful.

Interestingly, when the Veeam console does finally load, I notice the RAM usage for the system, after a short while, halves, down to about 4GB. I guess running the console executes some garbage cleanup, or causes memory consumed by other processes to be released. After the console loads once, it seems to go back to working snappily, and will remain snappy until the next day after the nightly backups are done. Is there a way to have this memory cleanup process execute following the nightly backups? I guess it works the way it does because in most deployments the console would not be accessed every day, so the system sets itself up for optimal backup performance by keeping a whole bunch of stuff in RAM - is there a way to turn that off?

[HannesK]

Hello,
disabling services probably is trial & error. I would avoid it and just wait that minute. I mean, it's a lab...

Are you running the console directly on the Veeam VM? If yes, it might save you some memory to run it on your desktop (that is not running on the NUC).

Best regards,
Hannes