Do You see similar results at Your side?
Best regards
Would you mind to share you argument set to an emulator? As far as I
understood you are using plain ballooning with most results from above
for which those numbers are expected. The case with 5+gig memory
consumption for deflated 1G guest looks like a bug with mixed
dimm/balloon configuration if you are tried against latest qemu, so
please describe a setup a bit more verbosely too.