How do you know how much RAM you need?

  • Running the System Diagnostics Report (a Performance Monitor built in report) on a Windows Server 2008 R2 running SQL Server 2008 shows "The system is experiencing excessive paging" each monring for a few hours. This time frame is when we are doing a database 'load' from a different database (not MSSQL).

    The server has 16 GB RAM and is capable of 64 GB. There are other servers that may be available that can have a lot more RAM (like 384 GB).

    How do you know how much RAM is needed to avoid performance issues?

  • First question--what's your maximum server memory set to for SQL server?

  • Maximum server memory = 13500 MB.

    Other memory options

    Index creation memory = 0 (dynamic memory)

    Maximum memory per query - 1024 KB

  • Hmmm. That sounds like a reasonable sort of setting provided you aren't running anything else but SQL on the machine--I was thinking SQL server might be trying to take too much memory and that was causing the paging. Might be worth lowering it a bit anyway and see if that helps.

  • Generally speaking you want to have a PLE (Page Life Expectancy) > 300 (5 minutes). In other words, you want your pages in memory to stay in memory a relatively long time, so they're not constantly being swapped in and out.

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply