Memory useage

Hi,
We have an SQL 2000 server with 1.2GB of RAM. Memory useage runs at 1.23GB
Total Commit Charge. Sqlservr.exe takes up about 980MB of this memory.
We have a few intensive data extractions that we would like to speed up and
the server seems to be the bottle neck.
Is there a point in adding more RAM to this server or will sqlservr.exe just
keep on taking as much memory as we give it? It is does keep taking the
memory, how do we know when enough is enough?
Svend.Svend wrote:
> Hi,
> We have an SQL 2000 server with 1.2GB of RAM. Memory useage runs at
> 1.23GB Total Commit Charge. Sqlservr.exe takes up about 980MB of this
> memory.
> We have a few intensive data extractions that we would like to speed
> up and the server seems to be the bottle neck.
> Is there a point in adding more RAM to this server or will
> sqlservr.exe just keep on taking as much memory as we give it? It is
> does keep taking the memory, how do we know when enough is enough?
> Svend.
Depends entirely on your server, your databases, and how they are used.
There's no question that more RAM is helpful. Data extraction routines
might not benefit much from a increase, however. You are likely
accessing a lot of data during the extraction. SQL Server loads this
data into cache as it is read and consumes memory during the process.
Once memory is depleted, it dumps the oldest pages as it reads new ones
from disk. If you're not going back to the same data pages a second
time, then you might benefit from more efficient disk access or added
CPU to speed up these routines depending on where the bottlenexk really
is. For normal production use, added memory helps if users continually
access the same data since it prevent SQL Server from having to pull the
information from disk.
David Gugick
Imceda Software
www.imceda.com