SBS 2008 ram consumption

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Skylinerecording

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 15, 2007
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I have a SBS 2008 box at a clients with 16 gig of ram in it. Right now the server is using 88-90% of it's ram. I have checked the device manager to see how much ram the services are using and everything except for a few services are using less then 200,000k each. The exchange store is using around 600,000k which is right in range and then a couple w3wp.exe services are using around 300,000k or less. Now here is where the issue lies 3 SQL engine processes are using a total of around 7 gig of ram. My client runs a custom software that uses sql express to host the database. And I am just wondering if it's normal for SQL to use this much ram in 2008 or should I be talking to the software company about the large consumption. It's basically using half of the available ram on the server. I did upgrade this machine from 8 gig ram about 9 months ago and it was fine for a while then all the sudden SQL just started eating more ram to point where we are today. Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks
 
Skylinerecording said:
I have checked the device manager to see how much ram the services are using and everything except for a few services are using less then 200,000k each.
Click to expand...

Ya mean "task manager"...'stead of Device Mangler?

:D

SBS will consume over 80% of whatever you throw at it..8 gigs...16 gigs, 24 gigs, etc.

SQL processes will natively consume a lot.
The custom software developer most likely had SQL Studio Express management console installed...if not, you can install it based on which version of SQL is in there
https://www.google.com/webhp?rlz=1C...f.&fp=fcd555eb71adf96f&ion=1&biw=1372&bih=751
Free download

I'd not go fiddling with it until you talk to the SQL app support guys. They may have seen that you have 16 gigs in the server and cranked up it's memory ceiling so that it runs well with all that RAM.
 
The funny thing about this software is they recommend a server with 4 gig of ram to run their database. The big issue I am running into is everyone is complaining about the front end of this database being sluggish. Everyone has the client software installed on their local machine then it just calls back to the server to access the database. What I am concerned about is when I first bumped this up to 16 gig of ram we had about 30% of headroom with ram consumption and everything ran great no complaints. Now that we have only 10% of headroom I am getting a ton of complaints. Also before I call the software company I wanted to see what you guys had to say about the ram consumption since you know the software company will say oh there is nothing we can do about it that issue has nothing to do with our software.


And ya I meant Task Manager sorry about that I wrote this 5 mins after I woke up.
 
Figure out what the issue is. Microsoft internal database is using 5 gigs of ram. So it's the database that sharepoint, WSUS all that fun stuff uses. I accessed that database through SQL management and notice it's set by default to use as much is 2.1 billion mb of ram. Has anyone ever put a max memory usage on this database? I am thinking about setting it to 3500 mb.
 
Offload the SQL database for the custom software to another server. Your SBS2008 box will appreciate that.
 
Typically either the exchange information store service or SQL service will use up all the ram but usually the information store will on the systems I've seen. It's not really anything to worry about. If the system seems slow I would split the DB, information stores, logs, etc. on separate disks. hawk's idea of a separate system for the SQL is not a bad idea which you could do with the "Premium add-on."

Just found this page which is relevant

http://www.bursky.net/index.php/2012/05/limit-exchange-2010-memory-use/
 
The custom database only uses 1 gig of ram. Would off loading it really do much? Also it's not really much of an option right now since we are setting up a Terminal server and that's all they are budgeted for. The information store is only using about 600 mb. I have been having some performance issues but turned off the SBSmonitoring database for right now and restarted there main database and was able to recover 15% of the ram and things seem to be running better.
 
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You can cap the RAM for the default instances....I wouldn't throttle it too much. Someone paid for 16 gigs of RAM....to not use it....that would be a waste of money.

If they recommend 4 gigs of RAM, they probably prefer to support 32 bit servers...sounds a bit old.

Since it's running SQL, are the drives on the server at least split? RAID 1 C drive for the OS and part of the pagefile, and at least another RAID 1 for a RAID 5 or RAID 10 for the D drive and Infostore, data shares, SQL data, second half of the pagefile. Hopefully real server SAS drives and not desktop grade SATA?

Antivirus exclusions for the real time protection.....what have you put in there?
SBS has a LOT of exclusions that need to be done for itself...as well as you should exclude certain SQL directories. Also you should set your antivirus sofware to scan the standard more limited list of file extension types....instead of the common default of all file types.
 
After talking to the developers the reason they say the server only needs 4 gig of ram is because they cap there database at 1 gig. The reason for this is because it runs off of SQL express not full blown SQL. I will have to see where the SQL database lives. This is one of those clients that likes to do everything themselves and not tell me what they did then expect a quick fix when something goes wrong.
 
SQL in any form will consume as much ram as you allow it too. IT would rather run the database functions from ram as it is much faster.
 
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