QEMU Guest using huge amounts of compressed memory on boot

Virt Manager configuration: Guest memory usage right after booting (nothing is running): I'm running virt-manager on a standard Ubuntu 17.10 system. In Proxmox, the same general configuration (with ballooning enabled) would allocate 8GB of the host but the guest would have roughly 1-2GB used out of 16GB instead of this. I'm pretty sure I have all the guest drivers installed. (qemu guest, virtio stuff, balloon driver & service) This is not my first QEMU VM, but the only one outside of Proxmox (which I'm assuming does some extra stuff that virt-manager doesn't). What really exacerbates this issue is if I set the **Current allocation** to 2GB, the guest has about 15.6GB compressed and most software won't launch or run correctly because there's no free system memory... ---------- Host: :~$ free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 32163 20273 8949 176 2940 11325 Swap: 2047 2 2045 Hardly anything is running on the host. It looks like the entire 16GB is getting claimed but simultaneously most of that memory is inaccessible to the guest.