MS SQL Server - Memory Page Faults

Author

Memory Page Faults

Richard Wells

2005-04-29, 11:23 am

We have a newly installed Windows 2003 (just hot fixes no SP) running on a
twin 3.4GHZ system with 4GB physical and two 4GB swap files on separate disks
and controllers.

We have noticed that shortly after starting the system we are continually
getting a high number of page faults. We think these are caused by SQL as
it's the only software on the system apart for Backup Exec, Ant-virus etc.

We are running SQL 2000 SP3 and its currently consuming 1.3GB of memory.

Any ideas of what could be causing this? I found an article relating to
configuring memory (274750), could this be the cause?

Andrew J. Kelly

2005-04-29, 8:23 pm

It's almost certainly not SQL Server. It's only using 1.3GB of memory and
it has by default 2GB to play with. Even if it ate up close to the 2GB it
would dynamically adjust the memory so that there will not be paging. Do
you have AWE enabled by any chance? If so then turn it off. AWE will grab
all the memory up to the amount it can use as per the edition and OS if you
do not set it's max memory setting. Then there is no memory for the OS and
the other apps.

--
Andrew J. Kelly SQL MVP

"Richard Wells" < RichardWells@discuss
ions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:62CA5D25-8405-4998-A463- A755CDCCE228@microso
ft.com...
> We have a newly installed Windows 2003 (just hot fixes no SP) running on a
> twin 3.4GHZ system with 4GB physical and two 4GB swap files on separate
> disks
> and controllers.
>
> We have noticed that shortly after starting the system we are continually
> getting a high number of page faults. We think these are caused by SQL as
> it's the only software on the system apart for Backup Exec, Ant-virus etc.
>
> We are running SQL 2000 SP3 and its currently consuming 1.3GB of memory.
>
> Any ideas of what could be causing this? I found an article relating to
> configuring memory (274750), could this be the cause?
>

Adrian Zajkeskovic

2005-04-30, 11:23 am

I believe Task Manager shows only cumulative values for soft and hard page
faults. PerfMon will let you pinpoint the process which is paging. See the
following articles for additional information.

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...kb;en-us;139609
http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...kb;en-us;555223

Adrian

"Richard Wells" < RichardWells@discuss
ions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:62CA5D25-8405-4998-A463- A755CDCCE228@microso
ft.com...
> We have a newly installed Windows 2003 (just hot fixes no SP) running on a
> twin 3.4GHZ system with 4GB physical and two 4GB swap files on separate
> disks
> and controllers.
>
> We have noticed that shortly after starting the system we are continually
> getting a high number of page faults. We think these are caused by SQL as
> it's the only software on the system apart for Backup Exec, Ant-virus etc.
>
> We are running SQL 2000 SP3 and its currently consuming 1.3GB of memory.
>
> Any ideas of what could be causing this? I found an article relating to
> configuring memory (274750), could this be the cause?
>

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