what is causing my windows page file to grow? I have one of my production servers that has a windows page file of over 32 GB.

The server in question has 32 GB of RAM, windows server 2008.

It is exclusively used for Sql Server. Nothing else.

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 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).

what could be some options as how I can do that?

I kind of like, in this case, to monitor Paging File % Usage and if something goes off threshold, I would collect all that is running on sql server at that time. Hopefully the culprits would be all there.

any ideas?

select @@Version



  Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - 9.00.5057.00 (X64)   Mar 25 2011 13:33:31 
  Copyright (c) 1988-2005 Microsoft Corporation  Enterprise Edition
  (64-bit) on Windows NT 6.1 (Build 7601: Service Pack 1)




dbcc memorystatus




Understanding pagefile.sys % Usage performance monitor (perfmon) counter correctly
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?