Windows Server 2012 High Memory Usage

memorymemory usagewindows-server-2012

Within the last couple weeks, I noticed Windows Server 2012 is using all available memory. Usually this server sits at around 6.5-7GB (of 8) and will occasionally reach 7.5GB but drops back down fairly quick. For about the last 1-2 weeks, it's been consistently maxing out memory. It started after a restart (had been on about 14-21 days) and some updates were installed.

Compressed RMP from RAMMap: https://files.pceasies.com/SERVER.7z

Process Explorer screenshot: https://files.pceasies.com/memory_usage.jpg

Not sure anything cut off from the screen cap is useful since I've tried closing running programs and that doesn't help. Driver locked at ~2.5GB is Hyper-V VMs. It seems to be related to the working set of System (the kernel?) being so high, but beyond that I'm not sure.

Let me know what else would be helpful.

Best Answer

I think the issue was related to VSS (Volume Shadow Services).

After some poking around with

Process Explorer
Process Monitor
Task Manager
Resource Monitor
poolmon
handles
Event Viewer
vssadmin (was taking a long time to list info and failing on some commands)

I saw VSS pop up in a couple different places. There were quite a few error log entries regarding VSS that appeared to stem from parts of Acronis leftover. I used the cleanup tools from their website and manually removed a couple leftover registry keys. In addition, there were some old, manual scheduled jobs setup to create shadow copies that were no longer needed. It appeared these jobs were trying to run too frequently and weren't able to complete. I suspect moving a lot of files around and being off for an extended period of time created a lot of work for VSS to do and it wasn't able to finish. Then the tasks to create new shadow copies would queue up on top of it encountering errors (possibly related to Acronis leftovers).

Since I've cleaned up that and removed unnecessary scheduled tasks, it appears to have stabilized again and is running as expected.

Related Solutions

Apache memory issues

It seems you are learning the hard way that PHP is a memory hog and not particularly scalable.

Some suggestions, in no particular order:

If you still suspect a memory leak set MaxRequestsPerChild to really low value.

Consider buying more memory, 360 megs is really not much nowadays.

Try finding an average size of httpd process by running ps or top and then setting MaxClients so that everything always fits in memory. Swapping is a death spiral, the slower you are processing the requests because of it, the more processes apache needs to fork, using even more memory.

If you laod php as a module in apache it gets loaded for every request, be it a script or a static file (an image or css or .js or whatnot). Consider serving static content from a separate server or using fastcgi or a reverse proxy like nginx to have apache serve only php to limit the number of fat php instances you have to keep in memory.

Weird memory usage in Windows Server 2008 R2

Is this a 64bit server - do you have the lock pages in memory local policy enabled? SQL is likely consuming the rest of your memory If you look at the perfmon counters you will see the memory allocation

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)' )

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Apache memory issues

Weird memory usage in Windows Server 2008 R2

Related Topic