what is causing my windows page file to grow?
what is causing my windows page file to grow?


That's a good question. If you want to know what applications are causing this in a physical environment and even to a good extent a virtual environment then the following performance counters can be used:


Process()\Page File Bytes
Process()\Page File Bytes Peak


Additionally I'd capture:


Paging File\%Usage
Paging File\%Usage Peak


In a virtual environment the memory pressure is normally done within the guest os by a balloon driver which artificially inflates to grab back memory for other uses. This generally won't show as using paged memory in the file.


  The lock pages in memory setting has not been set up for any of the sql server services accounts and I think this might be related to the big size of the page file.


I get what you're saying, but it shouldn't have a bearing on the size of the page file. The system settings for page file have the bearing on the size of the page file. It may be just set to 32GB... who knows. Check out why it's set that way in the system properties.


  I am already seeing if I can add more memory to this box, but I would like to find out what is causing memory pressure (if anything inside sql server).


If your min/max memory settings are set properly then SQL Server shouldn't be the main cause of memory pressure according to Windows, especially since you said it's dedicated with nothing else running. It could be internal memory pressure, where clock hands ae sweeping caches (inside or outside hands) and that would be due to workload/amount of memory available. That should be investigated.

How do you know there is pressure? Could you update your post with what you've found?