Very high kernel memory usage on SQL Server 2016 server (Windows 2016)

• samalex

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  February 14, 2018 at 3:12 pm

  #333595

  Hello.  This may be more of a Windows OS question, but I wanted to pose it here in-case others had suggestions.  One of our production SQL Servers is having issues where the kernel is using over 6 Gigs of RAM.  The server is Windows 2016 on VMWare with 48 days of uptime.  It has 24 Gigs of ram total, but currently the kernel is using 6 Gigs, Processes are at 17 Gigs, and we have barely 1 gig free.  Problem is SQL grabbed about 18 Gigs of ram before the kernel started to spike, so now we're paging like crazy.  

  The biggest question I'm trying to figure out is why is the kernel using so much ram?  This server is on an Always On AG cluster, and the read only replica is doing the same though though it's Kernel memory usage is closer to 4 gigs.  We're getting a failover scheduled so we can bounce both servers, but I'm just curious if anyone else has seen this.  This SQL server is being used by Microsoft Dynamic CRM 365 so it's getting lots of activity, but given even the read only replica with little to no traffic to it is having a similar issue I'm not thinking it's due to load.  Our former SQL 2014 server (Windows 2012 R2) is still up and the Kernel memory usage is closer to 400 megs.  I also checked some other SQL Servers, and each has from 100-500 megs used by the kernel.  6 Gigs just seems very high.  

  Thanks for any suggestions.

  

• AlexSQLForums

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  February 27, 2018 at 2:19 pm

  #1981369

  samalex - Wednesday, February 14, 2018 3:12 PM

  This SQL server is being used by Microsoft Dynamic CRM 365 so it's getting lots of activity

  are you using filestream for CRM?

  Alex S