Pagefile and Paging

My DBA sees paging ( high pages/sec) and thinks of increasing pagefile as a
solution. He believes the pagefile settings should be 1.5 times the amount
of physical RAM which I agree but I seem to find it hard to correlate paging
with pagefile increase.
Also under what conditions would one need ot consider increasing the size of
the pagefile if its not set to 1.5 * Physical RAM ?
We are using SQL 2000/2005
Thank you.
"F" <f@.hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:uBNVAg3lIHA.5684@.TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
> My DBA sees paging ( high pages/sec) and thinks of increasing pagefile as
> a solution. He believes the pagefile settings should be 1.5 times the
> amount of physical RAM which I agree but I seem to find it hard to
> correlate paging with pagefile increase.
>
He's 1/2 right. You need more memory. But increasing the pagefile won't
make a difference.
Basically SQL Server can page, or it can ask the OS to page to disk. Both
involve disk I/O.
Get more memory or rewrite your queries.

> Also under what conditions would one need ot consider increasing the size
> of the pagefile if its not set to 1.5 * Physical RAM ?
> We are using SQL 2000/2005
> Thank you.
Greg Moore
SQL Server DBA Consulting Remote and Onsite available!
Email: sql (at) greenms.com http://www.greenms.com/sqlserver.html
|||Increasing the page file size generally would not be the solution to hard
paging. I'd first try to determine whether hard paging is from the SQL Server
process (i.e. whether Windows is paging out the workign set of the SQL Server
process). If that's the case, try to find whether there is any other
processes that are consuming memory and caused paging.
It's also possible that you may be running into a SQL Server bug. For
instance, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/884593 or
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918483 are examples. I'm not saying that they
apply to your case, but want to point this out as a possibility.
Linchi
"F" wrote:

> My DBA sees paging ( high pages/sec) and thinks of increasing pagefile as a
> solution. He believes the pagefile settings should be 1.5 times the amount
> of physical RAM which I agree but I seem to find it hard to correlate paging
> with pagefile increase.
> Also under what conditions would one need ot consider increasing the size of
> the pagefile if its not set to 1.5 * Physical RAM ?
> We are using SQL 2000/2005
> Thank you.
>
|||I too agree that increasing the pagefile size will not help at all. Your
DBA's first thought should have been "what is causing the paging" and not
how to get around it. SQL Server is designed to do as much as possible to
avoid paging to begin with. It is likely you have other applications on the
server than SQL Server that require some memory and SQL Server is set to use
most of it. If that is the case you may be able to avoid the paging by
setting the MAX Memory setting in SQL Server to leave room for the other
apps. Adding additional memory may also be an option but you still have to
consider how all the apps play together.
Andrew J. Kelly SQL MVP
Solid Quality Mentors
"F" <f@.hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:uBNVAg3lIHA.5684@.TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
> My DBA sees paging ( high pages/sec) and thinks of increasing pagefile as
> a solution. He believes the pagefile settings should be 1.5 times the
> amount of physical RAM which I agree but I seem to find it hard to
> correlate paging with pagefile increase.
> Also under what conditions would one need ot consider increasing the size
> of the pagefile if its not set to 1.5 * Physical RAM ?
> We are using SQL 2000/2005
> Thank you.