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 AWE ENABLED?

Author  Topic 

sqldba20
Posting Yak Master

183 Posts

Posted - 2007-08-13 : 14:07:03
Folks:

Need help with the AWE Enabled Configuration option:

Total Server (Box) Memory: 3583 MB
Total CPUs: 4
SQL version: SQL 2000 SP 4.
SQL Server MIN Memory Configuration: 2060 MB
SQL Server MAX Memory Configuration: 3345 MB

OS: Windows 2003 Standard Edition SP 1.



Our Database server is doing lot of paging. Will Enabling AWE to 1 help sort out the problem and will it impact performance?


Thanks !

eyechart
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker

3575 Posts

Posted - 2007-08-13 : 14:22:10
nope.

1. You don't have enough RAM to consider using AWE.
2. You aren't running an edition of windows that supports this setting
3. You probably aren't running a version of SQL that supports AWE (just a guess). I am assuming you are running SQL 2K Standard Edition.

Read this article about /PAE switch and which OSes support it http://support.microsoft.com/kb/283037

You would probably want to investigate the /3GB switch instead. However, I am assuming you are running the Standard Edition of SQL 2000 and it only supports 2GB RAM (no way around it). If that is the case, then you are currenlty using the maximum amount of RAM (per instance) that you possible can.

A couple of solutions come to mind:

1. Tune your SQL statements to use less RAM. do this with SQL profiler and setting traces that filter on Memory usage.
2. Upgrade your environment to 64bit. Forget stopping at one that supports /PAE, go straight to 64bit if you are going to upgrade.

Tuning the environment is the preferred solution obviously.



-ec
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sqldba20
Posting Yak Master

183 Posts

Posted - 2007-08-13 : 15:41:37
Thanks eyechart for you quick reply !

Is it good to keep the MIN and MAX server memory on SQL Server to whatever is default?
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eyechart
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker

3575 Posts

Posted - 2007-08-13 : 16:50:09
quote:
Originally posted by sqldba20

Thanks eyechart for you quick reply !

Is it good to keep the MIN and MAX server memory on SQL Server to whatever is default?



if you have multiple instances of SQL server you may want to consider using MIN/MAX settings. If your SQL server shares a server with other applications it is also a good idea to set MIN/MAX. If the box is just dedicated to running SQL, I would not bother with MIN/MAX. I would just use default settings.


-ec
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usdasqldba
Starting Member

4 Posts

Posted - 2007-08-13 : 17:18:54
in my environment (dedicated SQL clusters), I have always been told to set max server memory to 1GB less than the total amount of physical memory. This keeps SQL from taking all memory and leaves a little for OS processes
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rmiao
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker

7266 Posts

Posted - 2007-08-13 : 22:57:01
Sql can't use more than 3gb memory in this case. If total db size is big on the server, may need add more memory.
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