Iis – Is it safe to kill a specific w3wp (IIS Worker) process in Task Manager on IIS 7, Windows 2008 Server

I found this article today which discusses in detail locked pages, AWE, and 64 bit systems. http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2009/09/11/fun-with-locked-pages-awe-task-manager-and-the-working-set.aspx

One of the bullet points (#3) is title "Why is task manager not showing all of the memory allocated for SQL Server"

It's a very nice explanation. In the end the reason this doesn't show up is that sql server has "locked" those pages in memory. Locked pages are NOT part of the working set so they won't appear in Task manager or even appear as part of the applications memory set.

If you run select * from sys.dm_os_process_memory you can see the locked_page_allocations_kb field which will tell you how much RAM sql server has allocated in those pages.

To cross-reference, you can use the process counter "ID Process". Include that in the perf data and it will show the PID for the process. That's fine for a one-off cross reference but it's a bit of a pain.

I still recommend the registry change if you can do it. In my opinion, the registry change should be part of any base build.

Here's a blog post that covers the same and confirms the registry change: http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2007/03/19/registry-change-for-perfmon-and-pid-data.aspx