MemToLeave and Thirdy Pary DLLs

Hi
I've been running into problems with a server that indicate that space in th
e
MemToLeave area is exhausted. The messages in the error log are along the
lines of 'Failed to reserve contigous memory', 'Clearing procedure cache to
free contigous memory' et cetera.
We do have a third party DLL in use and I've seen in a previous post a
recommendation to move third party DLLs out of the production server's
address space. The question is how to do this? My NT administrators don't
know. BOL tells me how to unload the DLL (DBCC dllname (FREE)), which I can
do once a problem has occurred, but is there a way of ensuring the DLL is
always out of the server's address space?
If I unload the DLL what is to stop it meing reloaded, as it is used by
database monitoring software that runs every two minutes?
I'm also a little confused by the -g startup setting.
One post I've seen says to set it to 384 to increase the space available to
the MEmToLeave. Another post states that you need 128M for the worker thread
s
and using the default -g will add another 256M, bringing the default to 384M
.
BOL is woolly on the subject, as normal.
Thanks
Mark
Message posted via http://www.droptable.comHi Mark
Some .dll's are designed to be run either in-process or ex-process & some
are simply designed to run in-process, so some can be forced to run
ex-process & some can't.
The type that typically *can* be run ex-process from SQL Server are COM type
.dlls, typically developed in VB6.0 (but can also be developed in Delphi,
C++ or J++0). you know you're dealing with one of these if the calling code
uses the sp_OACreate syntax. To make these guys run ex-process, you
configure them to run within COM+ or (or MTS on older WinNT) context, which
requires registering them in COM+.
The type that typcially *cannot* be run ex-process from SQL Server are
Extended Stored procedures, which are typically written in C and simply
aren't designed to be run ex-process. So if you're talking about a .dll
which is registered as an Extended Stored Proc, you probably won't be able
to make it run ex-process.
The post about the -g switch is correct. SQL Server's allocation of memory
during startup is best documented in Ken Henderson's Internals Guru's Guide
book. He's also written articles on SQL Memory Management, one of which is
here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/defa...ev_01262004.asp
But I dono't think this one specifically covers the -g switch in the detail
you're after. Try to get hold of the book, as it'd definitely covered in
detail in its Memory chapter.
HTH
Regards,
Greg Linwood
SQL Server MVP
"mpenfold via droptable.com" <u16092@.uwe> wrote in message
news:58090a9e28698@.uwe...
> Hi
> I've been running into problems with a server that indicate that space in
> the
> MemToLeave area is exhausted. The messages in the error log are along the
> lines of 'Failed to reserve contigous memory', 'Clearing procedure cache
> to
> free contigous memory' et cetera.
> We do have a third party DLL in use and I've seen in a previous post a
> recommendation to move third party DLLs out of the production server's
> address space. The question is how to do this? My NT administrators don't
> know. BOL tells me how to unload the DLL (DBCC dllname (FREE)), which I
> can
> do once a problem has occurred, but is there a way of ensuring the DLL is
> always out of the server's address space?
> If I unload the DLL what is to stop it meing reloaded, as it is used by
> database monitoring software that runs every two minutes?
> I'm also a little confused by the -g startup setting.
> One post I've seen says to set it to 384 to increase the space available
> to
> the MEmToLeave. Another post states that you need 128M for the worker
> threads
> and using the default -g will add another 256M, bringing the default to
> 384M.
> BOL is woolly on the subject, as normal.
> Thanks
> Mark
> --
> Message posted via http://www.droptable.com