THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA" : allocated memory

Throttling the memory on SBS 2008

bradley — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:07:00 GMT

So at the Florida group tonight I was asked if there was a blog post about how to throttle the memory on SBS 2008's use of Sharepoint and I did a "v8" moment of smacking my head and realizing I had not blogged this.....

Eriq Neale did two blog posts and two screencasts on exactly how to do this:

Setting the Maximum Memory Usage on SBSMonitoring | Third Tier:
http://www.thirdtier.net/2009/08/setting-the-maximum-memory-usage-on-sbsmonitoring/

Setting the Maximum Memory Usage on the Sharepoint Database | Third Tier:
http://www.thirdtier.net/2009/08/setting-the-maximum-memory-usage-on-the-sharepoint-database/

Throttling those instances

bradley — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 04:24:00 GMT

http://blogs.technet.com/asksbs/archive/2008/07/05/troubleshooting-high-memory-usage-by-a-msde-instance.aspx

I asked around and in general the rule of thumb most use is as follows:

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2007/12/25/adjusting-sql-embedded-instances.aspx

MSFW 128
WSUS 256 (per Dr. J's blog)
SBSMonitoring 70
SharePoint (I didn't tweak this)
If CRM is on the box, then limit SharePoint to 384

How to throttle BCM's memory use (or any SQL instance for that matter)

bradley — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:25:00 GMT

Stealing a post from Joan in the BCM newsgroup:

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.outlook.bcm/browse_thread/thread/ec72826d66064f2d/744893e30446cf04?lnk=gst&q=memory#744893e30446cf04

Many users report problems with SQL Express taking over memory on their systems and I have also experienced this. Much research over several days finally provided instructions on setting the Max Mem in SQL Server Express.
Here are my findings: Install free download “SQL Server Management Studio Express” for setting Max Memory
Info on why this is helpful:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/mgsqlexpwssmse.mspx#EPIAE

Download Source: “Managing SQL Server Express” (SQLServer2005_SSMSEE.msi)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=C243A5AE-4BD1-4E3D-94B8-5A0F62BF7796&displaylang=en

Installs to Program Files/Microsoft SQL Server 2005
User Instructions: Open SQL Server Management Studio Express Connect to SQL database
At Object Explorer, right click on Server Name to provide Properties Dialog box
Select Memory Enter desired Maximum Server Memory (in MB) (I selected 256)

The install and use is easy, and effective. Once installed, I ran through some heavy deleting of emails in BCM Contact Histories and contact category maintenence.

The system performed adequately and SQL Server never went over 210MB of memory.   I then tried (for the 3rd time) to de-select over 600 contacts from the "Manage AutoLink" and alas, BCM locked up, again, as this operation seems to be way too much for the program. But SQL never spiked to over 650MB memory like it did 3 times before. It maxed at 210MB.

One other step I have taken to improve BCM performance is to uninstall Desktop Instant Search.

Joan

Adjusting SQL embedded instances

bradley — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 07:51:00 GMT

My 1 gig SBS box at home is wheezing a bit because it's got WSUS 3 on here and 1 gig is just not making it anymore. So I looked under the hood to see what (if anything) I could stomp on and I could see that in task manager sqlserver.exe with PID of 1832 was bumping up a bit. So let's see if we can put a limit on that.

At a command prompt on the server I typed in tasklist /svc to see what PID 1832 was.

See the 1832 there?

See the PID of 1832 there in the task manager above?

Remember how we fix this? This time we're doing this on a server that has WSUS 3 on it with SQL embedded.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=65110 I downloaded that GUI tool to help me manage SQL 2005 embedded. I then used \\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query in the computer query field.

I then right mouse clicked on the properties like so...

And as you can see, you can now easily put a memory max limit to it:

Now if my box had 2 gigs, I'd limite WSUS to 256 as per the "this is what has worked for us" table says:

MSFW 128
WSUS 256 (per Dr. J's blog)
SBSMonitoring 70
SharePoint (I didn't tweak this)
If CRM is on the box, then limit SharePoint to 384

But I'm going to pull mine down just a little bit more and then when I get an additional gig of RAM on order I'll bump it back up again.

I'll restart the SQL instance for good measure (just right mouse click like you did the first time and click on restart.

Now monitor and see what happens.

Allocated memory alerts

bradley — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 23:34:00 GMT

For those that are having allocated memory alert issues on their SBS boxes, all of posts regarding the commands and tweaks are located under the header of "Allocated memory"

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/tags/Allocated+Memory/default.aspx

If your sql instances are causing memory issues, those are the posts you need to review to make the necessary adjustments.

Allocated Memory - what's the max/min values?

bradley — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 01:59:00 GMT

It's well known that SQL takes as much memory as it can, and several experts 
tell us to manually set the memory size to xxx.  But what number should I 
use for xxx?  I often see "100" as the example.  I assume this means 100MB. 
But why that number?  How could I be more methodical in picking a number? 
In the SQL 2005 Enterprise Manager that comes with the Premium Edition, I 
can pick a SQL instance, choose properties, and select the 'Memory' page. 
Can I get the same result by entering 100 in the field called "Maximum 
server memory (in MB)"?  What is the recommend Maximum and Minimum for:

MSFW
WSUS
SBSMonitoring
SharePoint

Thanks for your help in fixing the slowness of some services.

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2005/02/04/34984.aspx

Can't tell you what max/min is but here's what's worked for me on a 4 gig box:

MSFW 128
WSUS 256  (per Dr. J's blog)
SBSMonitoring  70
SharePoint  (I didn't tweak this)
If CRM is on the box, then limit SharePoint to 384

Your mileage may vary and bump it around if need be. I can't tell you the minimum
and maximums as each server may be different.

All I can tell you is what worked on mine. (edited in the SMBnation.com session)

Also make sure you aren't seeing a bogus allocated memory where you added more RAM and 
forgot to bump up the performance counters - http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive/2006/06/07/433707.aspx

After I added WSUS 3.0 I did bump up those counters a bit rather than worry about throttle memory 
use so much.

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2007/06/12/connecting-to-the-wsus-database-with-sql-2005-s-tools.aspx
Bottom line make sure you really NEED to stomp on memory use or not.  Watch that 
task manager and review your daily email report to see if it's really and truly needed 
that something is growing and growing and not settling down like it should.

And yes, you can use the GUI and not the command line to do all of this.

For reference, Dr. J's memory post on WSUS is here:  
http://msinfluentials.com/blogs/jesper/archive/2007/05/06/wsus-3-0-is-still-a-memory-hog.aspx

P.S. I just built a new category called "Allocated Memory"

ISA MSDE and the memory throttle

bradley — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 07:13:00 GMT

You may experience high memory usage on an ISA Server 2004-based computer that logs messages to an MSDE database:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=909636

SYMPTOMS

You may experience high memory usage on a Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004-based computer that is configured to log messages to a Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE) database.

You may? How about you will.

CAUSE

Microsoft SQL Server uses the available physical memory to optimize MSDE insertion and query processes. SQL Server is designed to release physical memory as soon as there is a request for physical memory from other processes that are running on the computer.

Note This behavior by SQL Server does not affect the regular operation of other processes on the ISA Server 2004-based computer.

Well it does in a SBS network... the annoying Allocated Memory alerts you get drives the network admin insane.

STATUS

This behavior is by design.

Who's design? Certainly not someone running ISA on SBS for sure.

MORE INFORMATION

Although this behavior does not affect the regular operation of other processes, you may want to limit the amount of physical memory that is allocated for SQL Server. To do this, follow these steps:

Trust me.. you will WANT to limit the memory

Follow these SBSized instructions to do so ... from the www.smallbizserver.net web site -- How to limit the amount of Ram ISA logging takes:

(That site tends to move things around... search the blog for "allocated memory" and you'll find the steps)

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2005/05/22/48500.aspx

Allocated Memory Alert

bradley — Sat, 27 Aug 2005 14:00:00 GMT

After you install SBS 2003 sp1 you 'may' get a monitoring error saying you have an 'allocated memory alert'. There are two possibilities of this issue that are VERY easily fixed. I've personally had both happen to me and both times just put a little 'governing' value on the ISA sql instance and the SBSMonitoring instance and the system was happy as a clam afterwards.

Here's the two past posts to review regarding the issue:

http://msmvps.com/bradley/archive/2005/02/04/34984.aspx
http://msmvps.com/bradley/archive/2005/05/22/48500.aspx

A post in the newsgroup today made me stick this blog post in here to capture both links so I can just point folks to this one now. If the memory alert is due to Sharepoint, you'll need to call Product Support and work through the issues, but if it's ISA or SBSMonitoring? Stomp on 'em with absolutely no side affects.

...for those trivia buffs... I really should have said “Happy as a clam at high tide”

ISA 2004 sucking up a bit too much memory in SBS 2003?

bradley — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 04:04:00 GMT

Mariette just completed an how to article on how to limit the amount of RAM the MSDE instances use on your SBS 2003. I've done this on my office machine [along with throttling the SBSMonitoring instance] and it's running just fine. Just remember if, upon investigation, the MSDE that is taking the memory is Sharepoint, don't stomp on the instance but monitor it and call support to help you set up a performance monitoring.

How to limit the amount of Ram ISA logging takes:
http://www.smallbizserver.net/Default.aspx?tabid=247

Allocated memory alert ... one more time

bradley — Mon, 23 May 2005 04:10:00 GMT

Alert on DOMAIN at 5/13/2005 8:29:05 PM

A large amount of memory is committed to applications and processes.
Consistently high memory usage can cause performance problems.

To determine which processes and applications are using the most memory, use
Task Manager. Monitor the activity of these resources over a few days. If they
continue to use a high level of memory and are less critical processes or
services, try stopping and then restarting them.

You can disable this alert or change its threshold by using the Change Alert
Notifications task in the Server Management Monitoring and Reporting taskpad.

So when I installed ISA 2004, I now have my allocated memory alert being thrown off by the MSDE instance tied to ISA server 2004.

So... how do I know this? Because my task manager told me so....and every night at exactly 8:30 p.m. I would get paged with a stupid allocated memory alert error [yeah I have critical alerts sent to my cell phone as alerts]. As you can see that Commit charge is running a bit “hot“ in my book, especially since before ISA 2004, it was certainly not running that much of memory.

That commit charge is running a bit hot again... so the first thing I do is look at what services are 'yanking' the memory again.

First we fire up task manager and we see that our friend, store.exe is our main memory 'sucker' and is normal, but that one right underneath ...we need to see what it is. We previously adjusted the task manager view [click view] to edit to show the PID, now we need to fire up the task services to double check.

Okay, so what does tasklist /svc from a command prompt tell us?

Ah ha...it's our Firewall monitoring service ....see that MSSQL$MSFW? That's our ISA server monitoring that indeed needs to be throttled.

If you've checked out the instructions on the SBS 2003 sp1 document [the community one, not the official one], you'll know that the recommendation is to perform a command to throttle that instance. So we open a command prompt and do the following:

Open a command prompt and type in the following instructions:

Osql –E –S %computername%\MSFW
sp_configure ‘show advanced options’,1
reconfigure with override
go

sp_configure ‘max server memory’,NNNN (Where NNNN is the amount of ram in mb. Recommended amount is 100 MB for SBS)
reconfigure with override
go

and end the command with

exit

As you can see the commit charge has now gone way down.

And you can see that PID 1612 [our firewall monitoring msde instance] is no longer sucking that memory.

And I'm once again a happy camper... along with my SBS box.

Allocated Memory Alert - part deux

bradley — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 01:03:00 GMT

You remember my allocated memory alert problem? My SBS Monitoring would start growing after I rebooted for monthly patches and would just keep notching up until I would get umpteen annoying alerts in the system telling me that something was wrong. Mine was easily solved by 'throttling' the amount of memory that my system would take for the MSDE instance of SBSMonitoring.

There are those out in SBSland that are instead seeing that Sharepoint is the one doing this 'ram memory' suck. Now first I will state that I am personally NOT seeing this, but if you are a heavy SQL user, you may or may not. SQL, like Exchange is designed to give and take the memory that it needs. However, if SQL starts 'sucking' so much that the alerts start freaking you out ...here's what I would do if it's Sharepoint that is the one causing the RAM to 'tick up'. [again remember, for SBSMonitoring I have NO ISSUE is just saying follow the blog post from before and take a look at the 'RAM' values in your daily performance alerts and SBS monitoring is probably going to be in the 125-150 range [your actual RAM value may differ]. For those where it's Sharepoint, I want you to get a better 'feel' for your system as there isn't a real good 'one size fits all' answer and you need to 'build a baseline'.

As always, you are wandering into the area that I would STRONGLY advise customers to call Microsoft PSS, and partners to use the Partner support resources.

Step one - establish the baseline - like in the prior blog post, the best thing to do is to establish that it is truly Sharepoint doing the 'sucking' of the RAM. If it is, reboot the server and record the amount of RAM Sharepoint is now using 'after' the reboot.
Step two - build a baseline value - watch the Sharepoint instance for a few days, how long before it starts 'ticking up'? You can get a 'feel' for where that 'throttle value should be by watching it for a few days.
Step three - do you have enough RAM in the machine? For SBS 2000 I had 2 gig, for 2003 I have 4 gig. Most are comfortable at about a 2 gig level on SBS 2003 [I tend to overbuy]
Step four - is your page file large enough? If you have the RAM in place at the time of building the machine, your paging file is about 1.5 times your physical ram. If you add RAM later, you'll need to adjust this manually.
Step five - ask yourself, are your applications truly slowing down by this? Do you see true performance impact?
Step six - Is it just that you have a lot of things going on in your box? Les has a box that throws off these allocated memory alerts but he's got like three Virtual machines running under it, look at the services running on that server and none of them look bad at all. What you are truly looking for is one of the services not 'settling down' as I would call it. Again, if it's just SBSmonitoring, I'd adjust that with no hesitation. For anything else, I'd monitor and call.

You should be aware that Mariette on the Smallbizserver.net site [which yes, is a real live production SBS 2003 under the hood handling that traffic], she did 'throttle' the SQL/Sharepoint to be 250 megs of RAM which she says appears to be enough BUT [and here's the caveat] she's smart enough to know what she is doing and used Performance monitoring tools to make sure she set it right.

Bottom line if you aren't comfortable with SQL [as I would not be at this stage, whereas Mariette is very capable], I would call PSS or Microsoft partner support if Sharepoint is the service that is making your memory alerts go too high and start to annoy.... and I mean REALLY annoy.... really and truly annoy..... Annoyingly annoy....

Kinda reminds me of the annoying Perf errors we used to get in SBS 2000...ah what memories...

Allocated Memory Alert Revisited

bradley — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 01:22:00 GMT

You remember my allocated memory alert?

Got it under control thanks to a newsgroup posting by David Copeland.

First off if you are seeing messages like this:

Allocated Memory Alert on DOMAIN

A large amount of memory is committed to applications and processes. Consistently high memory usage can cause performance problems.

To determine which processes and applications are using the most memory, use Task Manager. Monitor the activity of these resources over a few days. If they continue to use a high level of memory and are less critical processes or services, try stopping and then restarting them.

You can disable this alert or change its threshold by using the Change Alert Notifications task in the Server Management Monitoring and Reporting taskpad.

And while at first I bumped up the health monitor, I noticed that there was one of the sqlserver.exe processes that was right underneath Store.exe [Exchange is our normal memory sucker which is perfectly normal] and was sitting at 465,476K.

So David posted in to the poster, to check to see exactly WHAT sql instance was being the problem child, to go to a command prompt and type in tasklist /svc

Then go into Task Manager, click on the Processes tab [click on view/select columns options to make sure the PID [process identifier] option is selected and look for the different process IDs to see which process ID is using the memory.

PID is 672 in the one tracks to MSSQL$SBSMONITORING in the other. [see it?]

So then David said to do the following at a command prompt:

osql -E -S YOURSERVERNAME\sbsmonitoring [hit enter]

[you'll now enter like a command screen]

sp_configure 'show advanced options',1 [hit enter]

reconfigure with override [hit enter]]

go [hit enter]

sp_configure 'max server memory', ### [enter the value of the max... I'm trying 70 ... I just guessed at this from the poster in the newsgroup] [hit enter]

reconfigure with override [hit enter]

go [hit enter]

which looks like this:

And after I did that, the task manager now looks like this:

And as you can see PID 672 shrunk down and commit charge down in the bottom corner is much less

So I put my health monitor back to where it was before with looking to a max value for allocated memory of 2147483648.

Allocated Memory Alert on Domain

bradley — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 02:30:00 GMT

Alert on DOMAIN at 1/31/2005 8:05:59 PM

A large amount of memory is committed to applications and processes. Consistently high memory usage can cause performance problems.

You can disable this alert or change its threshold by using the Change Alert Notifications task in the Server Management Monitoring and Reporting taskpad.

If you are seeing that like I am I think we're hitting a threshold and we need to bump it up but I still have a SRX [PSS] call open on this. As you can see tonight WHILE THE BACKUP WAS RUNNING [and mind you mine backs up two machines] and remoting in...and setting up a new monitoring alert [more on that later] and I think I was doing just a smidge too much. Remind me to call back and see if they want me to kick up the health monitoring a bit. We've seen a smatterings of them lately and they tend to be Xeon's or Dual Processors.

Just keep an eye out for them and we'll keep you posted.