Yes the wording could be better. I refreshed my memory on the detail last night (one of Ken Henderson's excellent books) so I just want to add:

SQL Server uses MSXML and the DOM to process documents you load via sp_xml_preparedocument. It restricts the virtual memory MSXML can use for DOM processing to one-eighth of the physical memory on the machine or 500MB, whichever is less.

It's unlikely that MSXML would be able to get 500MB of virtual memory since SQL Server reserves most of the user mode address space for use by the buffer cache. MSXML allocates memory via the multi-page allocator (the so-called MemToLeave region) which has a default maximum size of 256MB. Since that region is used for all sorts of stuff (by SQL Server as well) it's likely to be much less than that.

MSXML is limited to 500MB of virtual memory regardless of the amount of memory on the machine because SQL Server calls the GlobalMemoryStatus Win32 API function to determine the amount of available physical memory. On machines with more than 4GB of physical memory, GlobalMemoryStatus can return incorrect information, so Windows returns a -1 to indicate an overflow. The Win32 API function GlobalMemoryStatusEx exists to address this shortcoming, but SQLXML does not call it. :laugh:

One last thing that I had forgotten - MSXML had an ordinal-only DLL entryn point added specifically for SQL Server to allow it to set the maximum virtual memory to use. Interesting stuff!

Paul