paging problem on a feed server

  • Hello everyone,

    We have a feed server thats used to extract our product information and send it to partners. The feed process does some logic first to find all the products to send and then either dump them to a permanent feed table, or write to xml file.

    The process uses lots of tempdb. And currently the counter pages/sec is averages about 200, and it can peak to more than 1000. The feed process is getting slower and slower and sometimes times out.

    I did a couple of things:

    -- add tempdb data files so it has 8 files, because we have 8 cpus. And make sure they have the same initial size, which is 2GB to start with.

    -- change the database to simple recovery

    I am not sure what else to do to reduce paging. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

    Thanks!

    Kathleen

  • Also, I also made page file the same size as memory (16GB), half on one drive and half on the other drive.

  • To add to my thread, two counters I monitored yesterday:

    buffer cache hit ratio -- between 95%-100%

    sql buffer manager:page life expectancy-- 1800 seconds

    neither of them seem to indicate a memory issue.

    Not sure where the paging is from and why the feed process is so slow.

  • I just found out that the vb application running on the server runs every minute and it opens and closes lots of connections to the db. I know its expensive to open/close connections, but can it be that bad?

  • is it 32 bit or 64 bit?

    how much ram you have in the box?

  • It is 64 bit, 16GB RAM.

  • Assuming this is SQL Server 2005?

    Do you have your max server memory set? If so, at what?

  • Yes, sql 2005 standard. The max memory for sql is set to be 14.5GB.

  • KATHLEEN Y ZHANG (6/5/2009)


    Yes, sql 2005 standard. The max memory for sql is set to be 14.5GB.

    Might want to consider lowering that a bit ... If you're running other apps on the server, you're only leaving 1.5GB for the O/S (which should have 2-4) and anything else. This is a bit of a gray area for me, but once SQL has hit it's max, it won't give it up until other processes need it (unless LPIM is set) so you're going to cause your other apps (point in case this process) to hit the page file. I'd say release some more memory and see what happens.

  • That makes sense. I will try it. Thanks!

  • I actually set max memory for sql to 13GB, and have been seeing memory available on the server being 1.5GB, should I give more memory back to sql server?

  • cap max server memory to 12GB and apply sp3 CU4 which will be coming soon and add lock pages in memory

    it should help

  • Over the weekend, I set the max memory for sql at 13.5 GB. Paging increased (avg 200/sec) compared with max memory at 13GB (avg 20/sec). But still a lot less than the original setting ( at 14.5GB, where avg paging was 500/sec).

    On the sql side, the feed process did not seem to improve. It seems to me paging is caused by the feed process itself. Whenever there was a big feed process running, paging peaked. In that sense, it seems more memory needs to be allocated to sql. Is there any other counters that can tell if the server is performing better?

    I will install service pack 3. Not sure what lock pages in memory means, but I will do some research.

    Thanks a lot!

  • lock pages in memory

    http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2008/03/25/lock-pages-in-memory-do-you-really-need-it.aspx

    In standard they will enable on SP3 CU4

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