Memory issues...
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My coworker has a brand new 16GB laptop. 16GB should be enough for most workloads, or so you'd think. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We're running "the usual", such as Outlook, Spotify, SourceTree, Teams, Chrome, OneDrive, etc. Now, with only two Visual Studio instances and a SQL Server Management Studio instance open, SQL Server (the service) just chokes. We're getting timeouts like you wouldn't believe, nothing works. After some digging, we found the reason to be memory exhaustion, 16GB just went up in smoke and it's at its peak at a constant 90+%. I've had 16GB and even less in the past, and running a local SQL Server instance together with VS and SSMS has never been a problem. At this point it's become unworkable. You'd think that maybe the memory would be more evenly distributed and that some processes would write to disk instead and become a bit slower. But instead, SQL Server just pretty much stops working altogether. Closing a VS instance fixes the problem, but sometimes we just need to have two instances open. My coworker changed his virtual memory page file to use 20GB and that fixes the problem, but doesn't feel right. Anyone have any ideas what the problem could be?* * Is this a programming question? Is it a SQL Server question? Is it a general computing question? I'm not sure, so I'm posting it here.
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Make sure you limit the amount of memory that the SQL Server service uses. By default, it will grow to use all memory available!
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My coworker has a brand new 16GB laptop. 16GB should be enough for most workloads, or so you'd think. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We're running "the usual", such as Outlook, Spotify, SourceTree, Teams, Chrome, OneDrive, etc. Now, with only two Visual Studio instances and a SQL Server Management Studio instance open, SQL Server (the service) just chokes. We're getting timeouts like you wouldn't believe, nothing works. After some digging, we found the reason to be memory exhaustion, 16GB just went up in smoke and it's at its peak at a constant 90+%. I've had 16GB and even less in the past, and running a local SQL Server instance together with VS and SSMS has never been a problem. At this point it's become unworkable. You'd think that maybe the memory would be more evenly distributed and that some processes would write to disk instead and become a bit slower. But instead, SQL Server just pretty much stops working altogether. Closing a VS instance fixes the problem, but sometimes we just need to have two instances open. My coworker changed his virtual memory page file to use 20GB and that fixes the problem, but doesn't feel right. Anyone have any ideas what the problem could be?* * Is this a programming question? Is it a SQL Server question? Is it a general computing question? I'm not sure, so I'm posting it here.
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As always, the answer is: it depends. :) You don’t say what version SQL server is running, or what the load is. But, you will probably want to set the service’s MIN and MAX memory allocation. Unfettered, the service will take as much memory as it can, and not release it unless caches are cleared. Hopefully it’s only being used as a development server and has only your coworker’s load on it. We always put our SQL servers (dev,staging, and production) on separate network machines. Good luck.
Time is the differentiation of eternity devised by man to measure the passage of human events. - Manly P. Hall Mark Just another cog in the wheel
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I decided to take the elephant by the tusks, so to speak, and ordered a new Dell XPS laptop fully loaded - I9 processor, 64G RAM, 1TB SSD drive and a quad density touch screen. Was pricey, but this will last me for the next 5+ years without mucking about with upgrades. Did the same with my previous laptop, and it served me well fo 10+ years. Not screwing around anymore... And this thing is awesomely fast. It can do a VS update 3x faster than my work computer. I have no complaints...
Andreas Mertens wrote:
Not screwing around anymore...
Exactly, my man. We just reach a point in life where tinkering around isn't feasible anymore. Priorities and all that.
Jeremy Falcon
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jschell wrote:
But you didn't mention the CPU at all? When this happens the CPU is low? Also which version of windows?
CPU isn't the issue, the guy has a good one. Windows 11 Pro.
jschell wrote:
And what was it set to before? Mine uses auto manage.
Same.
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
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My coworker has a brand new 16GB laptop. 16GB should be enough for most workloads, or so you'd think. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We're running "the usual", such as Outlook, Spotify, SourceTree, Teams, Chrome, OneDrive, etc. Now, with only two Visual Studio instances and a SQL Server Management Studio instance open, SQL Server (the service) just chokes. We're getting timeouts like you wouldn't believe, nothing works. After some digging, we found the reason to be memory exhaustion, 16GB just went up in smoke and it's at its peak at a constant 90+%. I've had 16GB and even less in the past, and running a local SQL Server instance together with VS and SSMS has never been a problem. At this point it's become unworkable. You'd think that maybe the memory would be more evenly distributed and that some processes would write to disk instead and become a bit slower. But instead, SQL Server just pretty much stops working altogether. Closing a VS instance fixes the problem, but sometimes we just need to have two instances open. My coworker changed his virtual memory page file to use 20GB and that fixes the problem, but doesn't feel right. Anyone have any ideas what the problem could be?* * Is this a programming question? Is it a SQL Server question? Is it a general computing question? I'm not sure, so I'm posting it here.
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
Sort of a side issue, but pay attention to what you buy. I'm on my third Eluktronics laptop - sort of a custom small shop, and I love the fact that they _never_ install bloatware. That said, I picked up a laptop for my wife with the assumption that I could add ram if she needed it. The spec was very subtle, and I missed the fact that the 16GB ram was soldered to the motherboard. No extra memory slots as well. I never even thought to look. This seems to happen if you get a very slim design. My new laptop (same maker) does not have this issue. What I find interesting in this discussion is the fact that Windows just does not seem to manage memory as one might expect. It's like the memory manager is brain dead.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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Of course. And is one really all that much better than the other?
Not "better" ... greedier at collecting data and calling home. I said Chrome was always "busy"; including tasks like "GoogleUpdate"; or whatever.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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My coworker has a brand new 16GB laptop. 16GB should be enough for most workloads, or so you'd think. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We're running "the usual", such as Outlook, Spotify, SourceTree, Teams, Chrome, OneDrive, etc. Now, with only two Visual Studio instances and a SQL Server Management Studio instance open, SQL Server (the service) just chokes. We're getting timeouts like you wouldn't believe, nothing works. After some digging, we found the reason to be memory exhaustion, 16GB just went up in smoke and it's at its peak at a constant 90+%. I've had 16GB and even less in the past, and running a local SQL Server instance together with VS and SSMS has never been a problem. At this point it's become unworkable. You'd think that maybe the memory would be more evenly distributed and that some processes would write to disk instead and become a bit slower. But instead, SQL Server just pretty much stops working altogether. Closing a VS instance fixes the problem, but sometimes we just need to have two instances open. My coworker changed his virtual memory page file to use 20GB and that fixes the problem, but doesn't feel right. Anyone have any ideas what the problem could be?* * Is this a programming question? Is it a SQL Server question? Is it a general computing question? I'm not sure, so I'm posting it here.
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
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My coworker has a brand new 16GB laptop. 16GB should be enough for most workloads, or so you'd think. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We're running "the usual", such as Outlook, Spotify, SourceTree, Teams, Chrome, OneDrive, etc. Now, with only two Visual Studio instances and a SQL Server Management Studio instance open, SQL Server (the service) just chokes. We're getting timeouts like you wouldn't believe, nothing works. After some digging, we found the reason to be memory exhaustion, 16GB just went up in smoke and it's at its peak at a constant 90+%. I've had 16GB and even less in the past, and running a local SQL Server instance together with VS and SSMS has never been a problem. At this point it's become unworkable. You'd think that maybe the memory would be more evenly distributed and that some processes would write to disk instead and become a bit slower. But instead, SQL Server just pretty much stops working altogether. Closing a VS instance fixes the problem, but sometimes we just need to have two instances open. My coworker changed his virtual memory page file to use 20GB and that fixes the problem, but doesn't feel right. Anyone have any ideas what the problem could be?* * Is this a programming question? Is it a SQL Server question? Is it a general computing question? I'm not sure, so I'm posting it here.
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In SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio), right click on the server instance and select properties. There it will tell you how much memory it's using and have some settings for limiting it.
Bond Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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I'm not sure anyone ever needs to admit that. :) It's a physical constant. Do you have any idea how memory expensive new icons are? Re-arranging menus just to re-arrange them? lol
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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SQL Server loves memory. If you're running an SQL Server instance on the same machine, throttle the amount of memory that SQL uses from the default value of "as much as I can get" down to something resonable.
I guess that if it by default limited itself to, say, 2 GB, there would be a number of people standing up and shouting: "Silly database system, not making use of the resources available to it!" Especially when we are talking about a server: Server software is primarily architected to run on a more or less dedicated server machine. Then it makes perfectly sense to default to using all memory (and other) resources available. As long as there is a way in a non-dedicated-machine environment to reduce the resource consumption, that is fine with me. Side note: I am not familiar with the MS SQL Server. But, I have several times had to explain to (non-professional) hacker friends that when the Resource Monitor shows less than 10% "Free" memory, it does not imply that they should double their RAM, when 75% of the memory is marked as "Standby". "Standby" memory is like "Take it if you need it, but as long as you don't ask for it, I keep track of which data was left behind when it was abandoned, just in case someone comes along wanting exactly that piece of data." If some database system (SQL server or any other) handles memory in a similar way, saying "As long as noone else need this memory, I will use it as a disk cache area, but I am willing to give it up on short notice when someone asks", then that should be perfectly OK, even if it looks as if it is hogging all RAM. Please note: I do not know if this is the case for SQL server or any other given DBMS. It could be implemented that way. A DBMS never has any significant backlog of modified pages; after a commit, all changed data have been written to stable storage. So giving up a gigabyte of RAM does not require writing back a gigabyte to disk.
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obermd wrote:
SQL Server - limit memory usage via Server memory configuration options - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn
The problem wasn't the limit, the problem was that there simply wasn't any memory left. We fixed the issue by saying SQL Server should grab a minimum (and maximum) amount of memory, 1024 MB. Works like a charm now :D All the other apps can do with a little less memory X|
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
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My coworker has a brand new 16GB laptop. 16GB should be enough for most workloads, or so you'd think. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We're running "the usual", such as Outlook, Spotify, SourceTree, Teams, Chrome, OneDrive, etc. Now, with only two Visual Studio instances and a SQL Server Management Studio instance open, SQL Server (the service) just chokes. We're getting timeouts like you wouldn't believe, nothing works. After some digging, we found the reason to be memory exhaustion, 16GB just went up in smoke and it's at its peak at a constant 90+%. I've had 16GB and even less in the past, and running a local SQL Server instance together with VS and SSMS has never been a problem. At this point it's become unworkable. You'd think that maybe the memory would be more evenly distributed and that some processes would write to disk instead and become a bit slower. But instead, SQL Server just pretty much stops working altogether. Closing a VS instance fixes the problem, but sometimes we just need to have two instances open. My coworker changed his virtual memory page file to use 20GB and that fixes the problem, but doesn't feel right. Anyone have any ideas what the problem could be?* * Is this a programming question? Is it a SQL Server question? Is it a general computing question? I'm not sure, so I'm posting it here.
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
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My coworker has a brand new 16GB laptop. 16GB should be enough for most workloads, or so you'd think. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We're running "the usual", such as Outlook, Spotify, SourceTree, Teams, Chrome, OneDrive, etc. Now, with only two Visual Studio instances and a SQL Server Management Studio instance open, SQL Server (the service) just chokes. We're getting timeouts like you wouldn't believe, nothing works. After some digging, we found the reason to be memory exhaustion, 16GB just went up in smoke and it's at its peak at a constant 90+%. I've had 16GB and even less in the past, and running a local SQL Server instance together with VS and SSMS has never been a problem. At this point it's become unworkable. You'd think that maybe the memory would be more evenly distributed and that some processes would write to disk instead and become a bit slower. But instead, SQL Server just pretty much stops working altogether. Closing a VS instance fixes the problem, but sometimes we just need to have two instances open. My coworker changed his virtual memory page file to use 20GB and that fixes the problem, but doesn't feel right. Anyone have any ideas what the problem could be?* * Is this a programming question? Is it a SQL Server question? Is it a general computing question? I'm not sure, so I'm posting it here.
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
> 16GB should be enough for most workloads, or so you'd think. Workloads for a regular user and workloads for a developer are very, VERY different. 16GB is nowhere near enough for a developer. You under-spec'd - The page file increase is a terrible thing to do, but the best choice for someone running multiple memory-intensive applications on a device spec'd for someone running Excel and a Browser who maybe also has Outlook open.
-= Reelix =-
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Sort of a side issue, but pay attention to what you buy. I'm on my third Eluktronics laptop - sort of a custom small shop, and I love the fact that they _never_ install bloatware. That said, I picked up a laptop for my wife with the assumption that I could add ram if she needed it. The spec was very subtle, and I missed the fact that the 16GB ram was soldered to the motherboard. No extra memory slots as well. I never even thought to look. This seems to happen if you get a very slim design. My new laptop (same maker) does not have this issue. What I find interesting in this discussion is the fact that Windows just does not seem to manage memory as one might expect. It's like the memory manager is brain dead.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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Sort of a side issue, but pay attention to what you buy. I'm on my third Eluktronics laptop - sort of a custom small shop, and I love the fact that they _never_ install bloatware. That said, I picked up a laptop for my wife with the assumption that I could add ram if she needed it. The spec was very subtle, and I missed the fact that the 16GB ram was soldered to the motherboard. No extra memory slots as well. I never even thought to look. This seems to happen if you get a very slim design. My new laptop (same maker) does not have this issue. What I find interesting in this discussion is the fact that Windows just does not seem to manage memory as one might expect. It's like the memory manager is brain dead.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
charlieg wrote:
It's like the memory manager is brain dead.
Is there any other class of manager? :rolleyes: :laugh: :laugh:
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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My coworker has a brand new 16GB laptop. 16GB should be enough for most workloads, or so you'd think. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We're running "the usual", such as Outlook, Spotify, SourceTree, Teams, Chrome, OneDrive, etc. Now, with only two Visual Studio instances and a SQL Server Management Studio instance open, SQL Server (the service) just chokes. We're getting timeouts like you wouldn't believe, nothing works. After some digging, we found the reason to be memory exhaustion, 16GB just went up in smoke and it's at its peak at a constant 90+%. I've had 16GB and even less in the past, and running a local SQL Server instance together with VS and SSMS has never been a problem. At this point it's become unworkable. You'd think that maybe the memory would be more evenly distributed and that some processes would write to disk instead and become a bit slower. But instead, SQL Server just pretty much stops working altogether. Closing a VS instance fixes the problem, but sometimes we just need to have two instances open. My coworker changed his virtual memory page file to use 20GB and that fixes the problem, but doesn't feel right. Anyone have any ideas what the problem could be?* * Is this a programming question? Is it a SQL Server question? Is it a general computing question? I'm not sure, so I'm posting it here.
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Edit: I see you solved the problem; I couldn't get to the second page of responses for some reason. Anyway, simple list at the bottom.
Same problem, same amt of memory. Weirdly, things seem to work pretty well even if the memory usage is quite high. Until it doesn't. I don't know why 16 GB isn't enough any more. I always have tskmgr open. Only consulted Process Explorer once so far. The usual first check and problem is a browser; Firefox is the main culprit (and/or add-ons), but I think I have way too many tabs open and too many bookmarks saved as well making it hefty. But the memory is fine when it first opens. The second check is VS. It is also fine until it isn't. Again, too many files/tabs open inside VS seems to be a possible issue. - try usage with no internet connection. - check for junk added by laptop seller (though I'm not convinced it's an issue.) - review startup apps regularly; stuff gets readded. - check task scheduler for hidden background tasks. <-- - check every single app for background calls to home (auto-updates, etc.).
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obermd wrote:
SQL Server - limit memory usage via Server memory configuration options - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn
The problem wasn't the limit, the problem was that there simply wasn't any memory left. We fixed the issue by saying SQL Server should grab a minimum (and maximum) amount of memory, 1024 MB. Works like a charm now :D All the other apps can do with a little less memory X|
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When you right-click on the server node in the object explorer you can go to properties and then the memory tab. There you can set a minimum and a maximum amount of server memory.
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