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Feb 11, 2019

SQL 2014 Will Not Use Available RAM and ignoring Minimum RAM Setting

We have a 2012R2 server with 2 SQL 2014 Standard Instances.

 

The server has 64GB RAM. It tends to use about 5GB to 8GB total for OS and both instances as reported in Task Manager > Performance tab. It's sitting at 56GB available as I write this.

 

One of the instances has the databases for an ERP application called Foundation, and we would like it to use a lot more RAM. The other is for a security system (door badges) and performance isn't important for that instance.

 

I have read how Task Manager is not accurate in reporting SQL memory usage so I ran:

 

SELECT (physical_memory_in_use_kb/1024) AS Memory_usedby_Sqlserver_MB, (locked_page_allocations_kb/1024) AS Locked_pages_used_Sqlserver_MB, (total_virtual_address_space_kb/1024) AS Total_VAS_in_MB, process_physical_memory_low, process_virtual_memory_low FROM sys.dm_os_process_memory;

 

I get 1956MB in use, and 1501MB locked pages.

 

We have the minimum server memory for the instance set at 30GB.

 

It almost seemed like we had SQL Express memory limitations in operation, and I have triple checked that the server believes it is Standard Edition.

 

We do have some long running queries which I believe would be helped if the instance would use more RAM.

 

It does not matter how many weeks we let SQL run without reboot, etc. it just doesn't use very much RAM ever.

 

Is this normal behavior? It seems sub-optimal to have pretty great hardware, SSD array for the DB storage, and SQL won't ever use more than a tiny fraction of available physical RAM.

 

Thanks in advance for any advice!

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