How much more RAM is needed as database grows in size to keep up with the performance?

  • Hi,

    Tried to google it, but could not find anything suitable.

    I am trying to do some capacity planning and I now have a good idea by how much my databases will grow in one or two years time.

    Are there any recommendations from Microsoft or hardware vendors about how much more RAM you would need to keep the performance the same. I know this is not an exact science here, but need to come up with some metrics.

    I was thinking of 50% memory increase as database doubles in size, but was wondering if there are any vendor recommended numbers?

    Thanks.

  • HI ,

    check the virtual memory in ur server in manage and as per the microsoft reccommendations 16 processors sholud be run in 24gb ram this will increase the perfromance of the server .

    Thanks
    Naga.Rohitkumar

  • There is really no correlation between database size/growth and RAM needed, so there is no right answer to the question.

    You can have a 10TB database that runs fine on 16GB RAM, and you can have a 20GB database that runs poorly on the same server.

    I't all comes down to how the data is used. Page reads from buffer pool is of course much faster that having to read it from disk. If you constantly need to process huge amounts of rows, for example for reporting purposes, the you would need more RAM in order for the pages to stay in memory, compared to system that just read small amounts of rows.

    There is also the procedure cache that you need to consider. Especially ad-hoc queries tend to suck up lots of memory, but the "optimize for ad hoc workloads" can reduce the space needed by these.

    In additions you need to consider if other RAM consumers, like query sort or hash operators, are increasing over time.

    There are loads of dmv's that can give you good information about memory usage, like sys.dm_os_memory_clerks, sys.dm_exec_query_resource_semaphores, sys.dm_exec_query_memory_grants and so on.

    You should also consider monitoring and trending disk I/O as disk I/O usually goes up when the system get starved in memory.

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