We have an 8 Core, 16GB RAM server that has SQL Server 2008 running on it. When we perform large queries on millions of rows the RAM usage goes up to 15.7GB and then even file browsing, opening excel etc gets really slow.
So does SQL Server really release memory when another process needs it or am I having another issue? We don’t have any other major programs running on this server.
We’ve set a max memory usage of 14GB for SQL Server.
Thanks all for any enlightenment or trouble shooting ideas.
Yes it does. See SQLOS’s memory manager: responding to memory pressure for details how this works. But what exactly means to have ‘memory pressure’ it depends from machine to machine and from OS version to OS version, see Q & A: Does SQL Server always respond to memory pressure?. If you want to reserve more memory for applications (I’m not even bother to ask why you browse files and use Excel on a machine dedicated to SQL Server….) then you should lower the mas server memory until it leaves enough for your entertainment.