Slava Oks's WebLog

You haven't heard from me in while and there is a reason. I moved from SQL Server's Storage Engine team to a new incubation team that is involved in exploring new directions in operating systems. This subject area has been always very fascinating for...

Q: What kind of ratio should you expect to see between AWE Allocated and VM Committed/Reserved? We are running 8GB with a cap of 7GB in the max server memory and yet the VM Committed is around 100MB. I was first shocked to see that the sqlservice in task...

This wait type represents waiting on multi page allocations inside of SQLOS's memory manager. As you remember from my description of memory manager's working internals, it has two major allocators single page allocator, SPA and multi page allocator, MPA...

sys.dm_os_waiting_tasks One can run lots of interesting queries using this view. You can even use this view to perform deadlock detection that is not resolvable by deadlock monitor, DM. For example if you have tasks waiting on external resources such...

Q: I thought I've seen reference recently to problems with SQL2005 not releasing memory when under pressure, and this was possibly due to the Lock Pages In Memory option. We have a server where this seems to be happening, i.e. SQL2005 uses all available...

sys.dm_os_schedulers Q. Do I need to by more CPUs? In order to answer this question you have to find out if your load is really CPU bounded. Your load is really CPU bounded if a number of runnable tasks per each scheduler always greater than...

SQL Server 2005 has a large number of DMVs that you can take advantage of especially when you try to understand behavioral characteristics of your SQL Server 2005 installation. DMVs expose enormous amount of information but how can you make use of it...

Couple of weeks ago I did a talk on SQL Server 2005 scalability. The actual talk was not about the enormous amount of features that you can leverage in SQL Serve 2005 to make your application scale but rather how SQL 2005 achieves its scalability. In...

I’m currently using the RTM+SP1 x86-SQL2005 build on a server which has 32GB of physical memory. I notice that during ramp-up the memory usage (as seen under task manager) increases to about 28GB (i.e. “Available memory” reduces to 4GB) and stays there...

Couple of weeks ago I had a chance to visit set of our customers and talk to them directly. It was an unforgettable experience. As a part of the visit I made set of presentations related to SQLOS and new features it enables in SQL Server 2005. I thought...

Q. A customer wants to run SQL 2000 SP4 in a Windows Server 2003 SP1 x64 edition. They did the installation without problems but SQL Server is not using more than 4GB of memory. Is it possible to enable AWE in this configuration? A. The answer is yes...

Recently I have recieved following question: A customer of mine is getting this output on an Itanium with 16GB of memory: Memory Manager KB ------------------------------ -------------------- VM Reserved 16979888 VM Committed 217928 AWE...

Q. Under SQL Server 2000 Is the memtoleave concept still valid under 64-bit? A. Yes. If SQL Server’s component requests memory larger than 8 KB block, the block will be allocated outside of Buffer Pool. Remember, inside of SQL Server, Buffer Pool is...

The answer is No. The source of possible confusion came from one of my previous posts: http://blogs.msdn.com/slavao/archive/2005/11/15/493019.aspx . I apologize for the confusion. In order to make 64 bit version of SQL Server leverage locked pages all...

By now you have heard a lot about the fact that under WOW a 32 bit process can get 4GB of VAS. I agree this is great, but I would like you to be aware of something that might hit you really hard. As it turns out enabling 4GB VAS can be problematic due...

In order for server side applications to run efficiently on modern hardware they have to understand hardware layout. As we are moving towards multicore and multi node NUMA systems, understanding relationships amongst cores, logical and physical CPU has...

Q1 I read in your blog about the new algorithm with two clock hands to control memory consumption, but I really would like to understand exactly what the hands are doing and if they relate to the lazywriter. A1. In SQL Server 2005 we have separated...

Seems like today is a question day :-). I will attempt to answer several questions about VAS I got today: Q1. There is one aspect of Virtual Memory that is just not clear yet. I think I understand about VAS, but maybe not as much as I could, but I...

Today I received following question: Hello, We will be running Windows Server 2003 x64 with SQL Server 2005 x64. I would think AWE would not come into the picture in this scenario. I'm trying to find out more about SQL Server 2005 memory management...

Our customers observed very interesting behavior on high end Hyperthreading (HT) enabled hardware. They noticed that in some cases when high load is applied SQL Server CPU usage increases significantly but SQL Server performance degrades. Occasionally...

As you would expect in the last several months SQL 2005 went through rigorous testing. During the period we have identified and put several improvements that you might be interested to hear about. Memory Broker Analyzing SQL Server's behavior...

Q: Hello Slava, I would like to confirm my understanding that on SQL 2005 64 bit edition it is recommended to grant Lock Pages in Memory right to the SQL account and then turn on the AWE setting. Thanks A: Yes, we do recommend to turn on Lock pages...

Yesterday I gave a talk around SQL Server 2005's memory manager. The talk was rather chalk talk. It included memory manager changes in SQL 2005 as well as changes post CTP15. For the talk I prepared several slides - basically talking points that I thought...

Sometimes I am surprised how issues come up the moment you mention them J . Recently, I have discussed Soft NUMA configurations in the article http://blogs.msdn.com/slavao/articles/441058.aspx . This week one of our customers had an interesting problem...

SQL Server 2005 has been designed to take advantage of NUMA features exposed by both hardware and the Windows operating system. There are several caveats that you need to be aware when attempting to run SQL Server on NUMA platforms. In this post...