• Thanks to all of you for your responses. My initial post may have seemed a little flippant but it was not. I needed to determine an appropriate setting for "Maximum Server Memory (in MB)" for SQL Server.

    Since my last post, I've been running an experiment on my employer's server. Rather than give all the details, I'm going to summarize my findings. I will preface them by stating that SQL Server has used all the RAM it would allow itself to use.

    The server has 160 GB of physical RAM. This number was taken from the "System Information" program.

    I allocated SQL Server 150,439 (in MB) on the Server Properties UI. The PERFMON program reports that number as 154,049,536 (KB) (SQL Server:Memory, Manager Target Server Memory). The difference between the 2 aforementioned numbers is ~3,610 (MB).

    The PERFMON program has reported that SQL Server has used as much as 144,547,768 (KB) (SQL Server:Memory Manager, Total Server Memory).

    Based upon my experiment, and having performed a numerical adjustment (~3,610 MB) to compensate for the difference in the values entered into the Server Properties UI and what has been captured by PERFMON, I have allocated SQL Server 142,000 (in MB) on the Server Properties UI. This value (adjusted) is slightly more than PERFMON shows that SQL Server has ever used.

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    I calculate that a gigabyte is 1024x1024x1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes.

    I divided 144,547,768,000 (from PERFMON, SQL Server:Memory, Manager Total Server Memory) by 1,073,741,824 giving a result of 134.621 GB.

    Is this ~128 GB? I don't know, but it is the amount of RAM SQL Server is actually using.