Server 2008 memory usage
Hello Everyone - We have a new 2008 box we have deployed for testing.We arehaving a problem with the memory usage on the box, in that is uses all the memory and slows the machine to a crawl. The only fixwe have found is a reboot. Here is whatwe have 2 x 5410Quad Cores 32GB Ram 2 x Areca 1231ML Raid cards with 2GB ram ea (2008 drivers) Lots of 500GB drives broken into various arrays, the one in question is a 2TB array SuperMicro 5400 based MB Windows Server 2008 x64 Enterprise Here is what we are doing For testing we are using the box as a ghost server to test the i/o. The server also runs a copy of SQL2005 with a few small DBs and 1 VM. During the ghosting process the server is very fast to move the data until the memory gets full from caching the incoming files. I can understand this to a point... (I would like to add that I am completely at a lossas to why it appears as if the OS is caching the incoming files yet theRAID controllers ram is virtually idle)However, the server does not "release" the memory when it is done. That said when we start to ghost another box, the performance is horrible, actually unusable, until after we reboot the server. We have let the server sit as long as a week and it still did not return to "normal" performance. So far we have tried changing the registery keys for PreFetch and SuperFetch thinking hoping to fix the problem. I would like to add, the same box with Server 2003 x64 Enterprise did not show the same problem. Yes it cached files during the copy, but it was fast to release and seemed to really utilize the cache on the RAID cards. Bottom line, can anyone point me in a direction?
March 21st, 2008 7:21pm

Forgive my ignorance, but I have never heard the term 'ghost' used in this manner. Could you please explain what you mean? tgc
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March 22nd, 2008 5:02pm

Thanks for the question. Ghost - Using Symantec Ghost to capture and deploy images of pcs and servers. Basically, we are writing 2GB files to the server during the process. The number of files is based on the size of the machine that is being imaged, ie 10GB machine = 5 2GB chunks. Does that help? Brett
March 22nd, 2008 9:06pm

I had this issue recently, 2008 has a diagnostic program you can run and it will tell you what program has the memory leak in it. Its in the Server manager under diagnostics then reliability and performance then data collector sets then system then system diags or system performance, run those, then click the book report or reports, best way to find out what program is causing the issue with the memory leaks. Then its the manufacture of the software who needs to fix their bugs for 2008 x64.
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May 31st, 2008 11:08am

The best way to check the CPU bottle necks and troubleshooting memory leaks is through a tool called Process Explorer which you can find it from the following link http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspxIf you face problems using the tool you can also post http://forum.sysinternals.com/Thanks Syed Syed
May 31st, 2008 11:27am

Not sure if you have this resolved yet. I recently migrated to server 2008 and noticed that if I copied larger files to a server over the network with either just a copy/paste or drag/drop that memory usage would grow and grow. To get around it I used robocopy as batch jobs. I didn't do a lot of research on the issue but it has something to do with file system buffer I/O - basically it caches the files to memory so future reads/writes to it are faster. If you're copying large files or many files you can see where this might be an issue.
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April 5th, 2010 3:40pm

Hello! Any news on this case? We have same problem and nothing helped to resolve it... Will SP1 fix this behaviour?
January 26th, 2011 8:52am

switch to linux
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March 2nd, 2011 12:43am

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