IIS/SQL Server showing RAM is 100% utilized but Processes add up to less than 15% usage

James Kehr with ORCS Web here. Thank you for considering our Virtual Dedicated Server package. The VDS package is an amazing deal and I am certain you will like the performance and features we offer.

As for your question, I am going to echo the comment above…it depends™. For the situation you describe 1 GB should do just fine. I peeked at the memory usage on a couple of our existing VDS servers with a similar setup and hit count and none of them are above 90% memory usage.

Just keep in mind that both SQL and IIS can get RAM hungry; plus you have the operating system memory footprint to think about. If your databases are relatively small, in the hundreds of megabytes total, and your site application does not use a ton of RAM you should be fine with 1 GB. On an very busy day you may get some lag during disk caching, but even then it shouldn’t be a significant performance bottleneck.

If you find that you need more RAM in the future we do offer upgrades at a very reasonable prices. In addition to RAM we offer disk space increases, additional vCPUs (virtual processors), enhanced monitoring and our popular Complete Care Package.

We do not publish upgrade prices for competitive reasons, but if you would like the current upgrade prices our sales team will gladly assist you.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

James Kehr

System Administrator

ORCS Web, Inc.

115982 is a very similar question

Is this a 64bit server - do you have the lock pages in memory local policy enabled?

the most likely reason is that this SQL Server 64bit instance is using “locked pages” as I’ve described in an earlier question. Notice the name on the Task Manager column is called Memory (Private Working Set). Remember we also said that if SQL Server 64bit instances use “locked pages” this memory would not be part of the working set (because remember AWE APIs are used on 64bit to “lock” pages and that memory is not part of the working set). So since the locked pages are not part of the working set, they won’t appear in this column in Task Manager. On the Task Manager for Windows Server 2003, this column is called “Mem Usage” but it also reflects the working set of the process.

Here is an article that explains it in depth

You can also view the counters in SQL

SELECT
    object_name
   ,Counter_name
   ,cntr_value
   ,ROUND(( cntr_value * 8192.0 ) / 1048576, 0) AS cntr_value_MB
FROM
    sys.dm_os_performance_counters
WHERE
    object_Name LIKE '%Buffer Manager%'
    AND RTRIM(counter_name) IN ( 'Free pages', 'Total pages',
                                 'Database pages' ) 
UNION SELECT
    object_name
   ,Counter_name
   ,cntr_value
   ,ROUND(( cntr_value / 1024 ), 0) AS cntr_value_MB
FROM
    sys.dm_os_performance_counters
WHERE
    counter_name IN ( 'Target Server Memory (KB)',
                      'Total Server Memory (KB)' )