Memory Leak? 1

[AtomicChip]

Hello all,

I have recently encountered what looks like a memory leak within SQL server, but may be a number of other things as well - I'm hoping that some of you may have encountered this problem as well so I may be able to narrow down my list of possible culprits.

I noticed this morning that SQL Server was chewing up about 1.5 GB of memory - obviously way more than it should be. At first, I thought this may be because of a coding error, but I was unable to reproduce the problem on my development machine (running SQL Personal).

After re-starting the SQL service (which cleared up the memory use), I ran task manager on our SQL server machine, and noticed that when queries were executed (especially queries that returned fairly large recordsets), memory consumption used by the sql server process would jump up, but then would not be released (as my development machine was doing).

I'm not a DBA, so I'm hoping this may be happening because of some (unknown to me) option that is not currently enabled/disabled on the SQL Server. My only other thoughts at this time are that maybe it's a bad install of SQL, or perhaps bad RAM? Any supporting/disproving thoughts? Any similar situations?

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance,
AtomicChip

 

[sqlturbo]

SQL Server 2000 is designed to consume as much memory at it needs to do the task at hand. It will not release the memory until another application or the OS needs it.

It sure is not a bad install or perhaps bad RAM. This is typical SQL Server behaviour. You can limit the max amount of memory for SQL server but that is not advisable.

 

[AtomicChip]

Thanks, 5791 - Found that a little while after my post (reading msdn)

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[yksvaan]

In my opinion, limiting the max amount of memory for SQL server but that IS advisable, I would even suggest it. Especially, if you have some other applications running on the machine, like IIS (although yuo shouldn't). But I think sql might even consume memory that the OS would need. So, I would limit the max memory to 75-80% of the machine's RAM. It shouldn't make any difference to sql performance. The absolutely worst thing that happens to a windows box, is that it starts paging, then the allover performance crashes.

Cheers


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