High memory usage Windows Server 2008r2 on VMware

windows-server-2008

We are running Windows Server 2008r2 on VMware and are experiencing extremely high memory use when nothing is running. The server memory usages slowly creeps up to 98-99%. The server is configured to use 8GB of memory. Is there some setting we should be using so the server can better manage it's memory usage. It's behaving as if there is a memory leak.

Best Answer

What version of VMware are you running? Server, ESX 3.5, vSphere, or something else?

Assuming you're running in ESX/vsphere, it sounds like you're just seeing memory ballooning in action.

With ballooning, a driver installed as part of the VMware tools grows in size in memory, forcing other inactive applications to page, consuming under-utilised memory in one server, and thus marking it as free to be allocated to other, busier, servers that need the memory now.

Under normal operation the memory ballooning technique is very effective and has little or no performance impact, which seems to be the case here - you've not actually said it's causing any impact, it just looks odd, right?

There's lots more on the subject in the vSphere Best Practices PDF

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Mysql – How to increase memory usage in MySQL Server to improve speed

table_cache is the most useful configuration directive to change. Each time MySQL accesses a table, it loads the table into cache. If you've got a high number of tables, it's faster to have them cached.

Take a look at your server variables by running:

show status;

and have a look for the variable open_tables. If this is the same as your table_cache value, and opened_tables keeps going up, then you need to increase the table_cache value in your configuration file. You'll find a balance by experimenting with these variables during peak times. You want to configure it so that at peak times, there are a low amount of opened_tables even after the server has been up for a long time.

key_buffer_size is also a good variable to experiment with. This variable affects the index buffer size, and making this variable bigger increases MySQL's index handling speed. You can look at the variables with the show variables; command again, and compare key_read_requests to key_reads. Ideally, you want the ratio between these two variables to be as low as possible, and you can do this by increasing the size of the key_buffer_size. If you set this variable higher, you will have less writes and reads directly to and from the disk, which was your main concern.

Windows Server 2008 x64, Large File Transfers, and Memory Usage

Try using RichCopy 4 by Ken Tamaru.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.utilityspotlight.aspx?pr=blog

Try running with the "Turn off system buffer" option.

HTH.

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Mysql – How to increase memory usage in MySQL Server to improve speed

Windows Server 2008 x64, Large File Transfers, and Memory Usage

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