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Asked: 2026-05-18T05:40:15+00:00

We’re running our application’s database on dedicated box running only SQL Server 2005. This

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We’re running our application’s database on dedicated box running only SQL Server 2005.
This DB server has 32 Gb of RAM… and the database file itself is only 6 Gb.

I’d like to force several of the heavily read/queried tables into the SQL Memory buffer to increase speed.

I understand that SQL server is really good about keeping necessary data cached in memory once it’s read from disk… But our clients would probably prefer their query running quickly the FIRST time.
“Fastest Performance the Second Time” isn’t exactly a product highlight.

Short of the old “Pin Table” DBCC command.. any thoughts?

I’ve written a “CacheTableToSQLMemory” Proc which Loops through all of a table’s Indexes (Clustered & Non) , performing a “Select *” into a Temp table. I’ve scheduled SQL Agent to run a “cache lots of tables” Proc every 15 minutes in an attempt to keep pages in Memory.

It works to a large extent.. but even after I cache all of a query’s relevant tables, running a query still increased the Count of Cached pages for that table. then it’s faster the 2nd time.
thoughts?

We’re running PAE & AWE. SQL is set to use between 8 & 20 GB of RAM.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The x86 bottleneck is your real issue. AWE can serve only data pages, as they can be mapped in and out of the AWE areas, but every other memory allocation has to cram in the 2GB of the process virtual address space. That would include every thread stack, all the code, all the data currently mappen ‘in use’ from AWE and, most importantly, every single cached plan, execution plan, cached security token, cached metadata and so on and so forth. and I’m not even counting CLR, I hope you don’t use it.

    Given that the system has 32GB of RAM, you can’t even try /3GB and see if that helps, because of the total PAE reduction to 16GB in that case that would make half your RAM invisible…

    You realy, really, have to move to x64. AWE can help only that much. You could collect performance counters from the Buffer Manager and Memory Manager objects and monitor sys.dm_os_memory_clerks so you could get a better picture of how is the instance memory behaving (where does the memory in use go, who is consuming it etc). I don’t expect that will help you solve the issue really, but I do expect it will give you enough information to make a case for the upgrade to x64.

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