I'm running out of space on one of my servers and the only space that I can free in the immediate is re-sizing the enormous pagefile. The server has 128GB of memory and is currnetly set to "automatically manage" the pagefile, with a recommended size of 196599 MB. That seems ridiculously high to me.
It's a 2008 R2 Enterprise server running as a SQL Server 2008 R2 server and according to perfmon it looks like the page file utilization is between 2% and 3%.
Should I be worried about any negative repercussions of dropping the max down to like 20GB ro so?
Best Answer
You really shouldn't need a pagefile more than 4-6GB except in certain circumstances.
The only major drawback to having a pagefile smaller than your system memory is that in the event of a BSOD, you won't get a full crash dump. I'd test your system with 6GB, 8GB and 10GB pagefiles and see how performance is. If it's not a machine that swaps a lot, you might find that 6GB is fine assuming you have sane MaxMem settings in SQL Server.