February 5, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Hi
Our production OLTP database server has 8GB of physical memory. There have been some performance problems and upon investigation it was found that the average page life expectancy was low and frequently dropped by a significant amount, pointing to us having a memory bottleneck. Further investigation revealed that AWE memory was not turned of for the SQL instance.
We have now enabled AWE memory, well think we have. When I run this query as provided by BOL:
select sum(awe_allocated_kb) / 1024 as [AWE allocated, Mb]
from sys.dm_os_memory_clerks
I get a value of zero. Does this mean AWE is not being used?
Task Manager still reports ~5GB free memory although it is my understanding that Task Manager does not report memory usage correctly with regards to AWE.
The page life expectancy is remaining low, something I would have thought would have been significantly affected if AWE was implemented correctly.
- EBH
If brute force is not working you're not using enough.
February 5, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Check out this blog post from the CSS engineers. I think it will give you everything you need to check and go farther if you need.
Not sure if you are on 32 bit but I am guessing yes so, don't think the article is just 64-Bit. There is 32-Bit snippets in there as well.
HTH (hope this helps)
David
@SQLTentmaker“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose” - Jim Elliot
February 5, 2009 at 8:54 pm
CSS SQL Server Engineers post is very useful
Rajesh Kasturi
February 5, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Rajesh kasturi (2/5/2009)
CSS SQL Server Engineers post is very useful
Yeah, those guys seem to know what they are doing. 😛
David
@SQLTentmaker“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose” - Jim Elliot
February 5, 2009 at 9:21 pm
More than helped, it was exactly what I needed.
We had the group policy setup and the 'awe enabled' flag set so we restarted the SQL Server service and read through the ERRLOG and saw this message:
Set AWE Enabled to 1 in the configuration parameters to allow use of more memory
That confused me for a bit because we already had that setting set. So I changed it to 0 and then back to 1 and bounced SQL again. This time it started we could see this message:
Address Windowing Extensions is enabled.
I think the problem was when we set the group policy to enabled page locking SQL was already running. The first time we bounced SQL it picked up new right and it was after that we should have set AWE enabled in SQL.
Thanks so much for your help, you have just made a perfect ending to Friday of a bad week.
- EBH
If brute force is not working you're not using enough.
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