THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"

Will this improve the responsiveness for a system with only 4GB of RAM?  I find that 4GB doesn't seem to be enough for a regular SBS 2008 Standard rollout, and so I've been recommending 8GB to my clients that have small networks (less than 10 users that use mostly just email, MS Office, and SharePoint).  Besides, RAM is cheap and it certainly doesn't hurt to increase it (but DDR2 is going up slowly in price - expect it to balloon during the holidays).

I have 8GB in my own system, and it's used for deploying software onto new computers (using WDS) but not steadily.  Most of the time it's used for just file storage and email, but I still have that issue where the Exchange Transport and Stores miss their startup cue on a reboot.  I've tried playing with the startup timeouts and retries but it doesn't really help.  I just turn them on manually after a reboot and everything works.

This helps with 4GB installs.

Also, for the services failing to startup, get Exchange patched up to at least Rollup 5 if not whatever the current one is (9 as I make this post).

That fixes that problem.

I'm not so sure anymore that it's a good idea to play with SQL Server memory settings. Or any Microsoft programs memory settings. Most are designed to grab or release memory as needed on the fly. Always remember, UNUSED MEMORY IS WASTED MEMORY. If you don't believe me ask Mark Russinovich: blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich

Plus the MAX and MIN SQL settings only effect the SQL BUFFER as stated here:

support.microsoft.com/.../321363

and here:

blogs.msdn.com/.../q-a-does-sql-server-always-respond-to-memory-pressure.aspx

"Note that the max server memory option only limits the size of the SQL Server buffer pool. The max server memory option does not limit a remaining unreserved memory area that SQL Server leaves for allocations of other components such as extended stored procedures, COM objects, non-shared DLLs, EXEs, and MAPI components. Because of the preceding allocations, it is normal for the SQL Server private bytes to exceed the max server memory configuration"

I suppose there are always very special cases where they should be adjusted but I would ask Microsoft first.

Any advice on throttling the memory requirements for the IIS side of things?

On one of my servers, all of the w3wp processes add up to 600mb of memory.