Memory has been paged out/Page life expectance/High Disk Queue length

  • Hi,

    We have SQL Server 2005 EE x64 with SP3 on Windows 2003 EE x64 R2. We have 16 GB of RAM.

    When ever I restart the SQL Service, I'm getting the below messgae in the error log:

    A significant part of sql server process memory has been paged out. This may result in a performance degradation. Duration: 0 seconds. Working set (KB): 38876, committed (KB): 105728, memory utilization: 36%.

    and when ever the DBCC CHECKDB job runs, I'm getting the below alarm from Spot light:

    Page Life Expectancy: The buffer cache page life expectancy is 42 seconds.

    And then immediately High Disk IO alarm as below:

    Disk Queue Length: Disk D: has an average queue length of 6.

    Please advice

  • To me, those metrics would indicate memory pressure. How big is your database? What do your Target Server Memory and Total Server Memory look like? Also, is the page file getting used?

  • Thanks,

    These are the Share point databases. We have 10 Databases and the biggest database size id 20 GB and the rest are <2GB

    How could I Know whether page file used or not. We are using the default page file size. And it is a A/A/P cluster setup.

  • When ever I restart the SQL Service, I'm getting the below message in the error log:

    A significant part of sql server process memory has been paged out. This may result in a performance degradation. Duration: 0 seconds. Working set (KB): 38876, committed (KB): 105728, memory utilization: 36%.

    Is that normal to get the above error every time when the SQL instance restarts??

  • 1) checkdb is VERY IO intensive, so I would expect to see indications of IO/Memory pressure during it's execution

    2) There are MANY things that can interplay to cause memory to be paged out - cluster instances being on the same machine, other applications, memory settings, file operations in windows, etc, etc. I recommend you get a professional to hook up to your system to give it a review. You could be going back and forth here for days or weeks without finding a cause.

    Best,
    Kevin G. Boles
    SQL Server Consultant
    SQL MVP 2007-2012
    TheSQLGuru on googles mail service

  • Try enabling "Lock Pages In Memory" and setting Max Memory to an appropriate number. Is the Page Life Expectancy counter consistently below 300 or was that just a spike? You can check The Paging File object's % Usage and % Usage Peak to see how extensively the page file is being used.

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