Page Life Expentancy

  • HI. I'm watching my performance monitors and noticed that the PAGE LIFE EXPENTANCY took a drastic dip. Can anyone explain what could be happening there.

    Juanita

     

  • My (limited) understanding is that this is a measure of memory pressure.  If the pages are being dumped faster, it means SQL Server decided it needs those resources freed up since it needs to memory space.

     

  • Hello Juanita,

    When that counter takes a drastic drop, it is usually caused by a process or processes that are accessing data that is not in memory, and so much data that the amount exceeds or is a significant portion of the amount of available memory on the server.

    So, this could be caused by the occasional full scan of a very large table, or some query that builds a very large temporary table or in-memory spool.  This sort of situation will normally be evidenced by sudden drops in the PLE.

    If this process cannot be fixed, (e.g. you really need to scan that huge table) then the solution would be to add memory.

    Another cause could be restarting the SQL server.  I think the PLE counter starts at a low number when SQL starts up. 

    jg

  • Thank you very much !!

    Juanita

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