Swings in Page Life Expectancy

  • Perfmon and Diagnostic manager are both showing large swings my servers page life expectancy. It doesn't seem to be a bottleneck right now but I'd like to find the source of the swings.

    Any suggestions on how to do that in Sql 2000?

  • How much memory on your server? What is OS? What Edition of SQL Server? And what is your Max/Min settings?

    Mohit.

    [font="Arial"]---

    Mohit K. Gupta, MCITP: Database Administrator (2005), My Blog, Twitter: @SQLCAN[/url].
    Microsoft FTE - SQL Server PFE

    * Some time its the search that counts, not the finding...
    * I didn't think so, but if I was wrong, I was wrong. I'd rather do something, and make a mistake than be frightened and be doing nothing. :smooooth:[/font]

    How to ask for help .. Read Best Practices here[/url].

  • Win2003 Sp1, Sql 2000 8.00.2187 12 gig of Ram, With 10 gig set as the max, no min is set.

    I strongly doubt the server is memory hungry. More likely an inefficient operation is causing the big swings.

    David

  • David O (4/17/2009)


    Perfmon and Diagnostic manager are both showing large swings my servers page life expectancy. It doesn't seem to be a bottleneck right now but I'd like to find the source of the swings.

    Any suggestions on how to do that in Sql 2000?

    Could be of bad application code. Identify the queries that are running at that moment and examine them.

  • Hi David,

    Question, is that 64-bit or 32-bit. If 32-bit do you have the AWE enabled?

    Mohit.

    [font="Arial"]---

    Mohit K. Gupta, MCITP: Database Administrator (2005), My Blog, Twitter: @SQLCAN[/url].
    Microsoft FTE - SQL Server PFE

    * Some time its the search that counts, not the finding...
    * I didn't think so, but if I was wrong, I was wrong. I'd rather do something, and make a mistake than be frightened and be doing nothing. :smooooth:[/font]

    How to ask for help .. Read Best Practices here[/url].

  • 32 bit and awe is enabled. The server configuration is solid, I'm confident of that.

  • Excellent :), I wanted to ask the normal questions. Because didn't want to have to go over something and realize we missed something heh.

    As for what could be taking up the memory; when I was tuning a server I found the vendor had setup massive amount of data move that cased the memory issue in my server. So I recommend check jobs; are there any jobs that are moving massive data.

    Next is queries; if there are queries that are wide selects. That is they are selecting everything they will probably take a little while to execute; please check the Disk IO in conjecture with the Cache Hit Ratio and Page Life Expectancy. If Disk IO is spiking during the same time you have a selects issue; you need to capture using Profiler what selects/procs are being executed against server to waste the space.

    Thanks.

    Mohit.

    [font="Arial"]---

    Mohit K. Gupta, MCITP: Database Administrator (2005), My Blog, Twitter: @SQLCAN[/url].
    Microsoft FTE - SQL Server PFE

    * Some time its the search that counts, not the finding...
    * I didn't think so, but if I was wrong, I was wrong. I'd rather do something, and make a mistake than be frightened and be doing nothing. :smooooth:[/font]

    How to ask for help .. Read Best Practices here[/url].

  • Is this SQL Server 'Standard' or SQL Server 'Enterprise' edition ???

    RegardsRudy KomacsarSenior Database Administrator"Ave Caesar! - Morituri te salutamus."

  • Enterprise.

  • Could you post your boot.ini file ?

    Also, the resutls of the folllowing:

    exec sp_configure 'awe enabled'

    exec sp_configure 'min server memory (MB)'

    exec sp_configure 'max server memory (MB)'

    exec sp_configure 'set working set size'

    RegardsRudy KomacsarSenior Database Administrator"Ave Caesar! - Morituri te salutamus."

  • Could you also post an example of the swings in 'page life expectancy' ?

    lows and highs from a few random samples would be good.

    how is your buffer cache hit ratio ?

    From perfmon specifically, what is your current and average disk queue lengtyhs during the lows ?

    RegardsRudy KomacsarSenior Database Administrator"Ave Caesar! - Morituri te salutamus."

  • Rudy

    I appreciate the direction you are taking this but this server configuration is rock solid. The server is not experiencing any obvious signs of a memory bottleneck. Some process is inefficient so I was looking for ideas on how to track down memory hogging processes in Sql 2000.

    Again, thanks for the good questions, it is just the wrong direction.

    David

  • David O (4/21/2009)


    Rudy

    I appreciate the direction you are taking this but this server configuration is rock solid. The server is not experiencing any obvious signs of a memory bottleneck. Some process is inefficient so I was looking for ideas on how to track down memory hogging processes in Sql 2000.

    Again, thanks for the good questions, it is just the wrong direction.

    David

    Have you identified whats causing your memory slwodown?? Did you run a trace and identify any expensive queries?

  • Thanks for everyone's ideas and input. For my purpose I'm going to call this thread closed.

    Take care,

    David

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