Size of the Page File with SQL Windows 2003 Server 64-Bit

  • Having a bit of a friendly discussion with another dba. He says virtually all db platforms running on Windows need to have page files 1.5x the size of the memory on the server.

    Has anyone else heard that because it was new to me.

    Also we have over 70 GB of memory on the server and 105+ GB in page file(s) seems like a lot to me?

    thoughts?

    Thanks

  • I've never heard or read about this.... The ideal case for MSSQLServer is when you have enough memory to fit the whole database... I my modest opinion the windows page file should be sized considering the amount of RAM and the size of the databases.

  • I think 1.5 was a good guideline when servers had 4 GB of memory or less. I'm not sure if this is something that scales up. I'm trying to imagine what the page file would need to hold to consume 100 GB.

    This is really more of a Windows thing, so you may wnat to ask this on a Windows forum.

  • 1.5 is something needed on servers where you expect to grab full memory dump for analysis. If not your values are to be much more smaller.

    You can find some methods of how to calculate a good estimate for your system here:

    How to determine the appropriate page file size for 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP


    * Noel

  • on a x64 system you can run without a page file. If you have a page file then windows will use it no matter how much resource you have available ( I find this very annoying )

    Anyway just monitor the use of your page file and adjust to somewhere above the use. You don't want your sql server paging, really the page files come from the days of very low physical memory ( maybe $800 for 16MB chips ) where you made use of virtual memory. I'd probably think 6-8gb was adequate for a page file. I'd not personally bother about memory dumps unless I had an issue.

    [font="Comic Sans MS"]The GrumpyOldDBA[/font]
    www.grumpyolddba.co.uk
    http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/grumpyolddba/

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply