Min & Max Memory in 2005

My experience so far has been you should at least set the max server
memory if you are beyond 2GB range, regardless of x86 or x64.
Note...if you are running x64 and have more than once instance, you
will also should to set it for ALL instances if you have more than one
on the box (or cluster in an active/active situation)...otherwise, the
most greedy instance wins out, creating memory pressure on the OS as
well...or so it goes from my experience. SQL will give up memory when
it recieves the out memory messages from the OS, but in the few times
I tested it during our initial deployment, the memory starvation of
one instance created massive slow downs in performance.

On Jun 15, 9:44 am, "Cgal" wrote:
> Is there a best practice for setting the Minimum and Maximum Memory settings
> in SQL Server 2005 on a dedicated SQL Server machine. With SQL Server 2000
> we set the minimum and maximum memory to be the same value on our large
> clustered SQL Server machines. This seemed to work very well. Is the same
> true for 2005?

Setting the min and max to the same basically fixes your memory at that
point and doesn't leave room for the OS to share if needed. In general leave
the min at 0 (default) and set the MAX to a value to always leave some for
the OS. Most systems will work fine with MAX at the default if you are not
using AWE but there may be times when you simply want to leave x amount of
memory for the OS and any other apps running on the server. If you are using
AWE and 32 bit you must set it to some value less than MAX because it is not
dynamic and will starve the OS.How much you leave depends on how much you
have and what you are doing.

--
Andrew J. Kelly SQL MVP

"Cgal" wrote in message
news:%23AqYlN1rHHA.4768@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
> Is there a best practice for setting the Minimum and Maximum Memory
> settings in SQL Server 2005 on a dedicated SQL Server machine. With SQL
> Server 2000 we set the minimum and maximum memory to be the same value on
> our large clustered SQL Server machines. This seemed to work very well.
> Is the same true for 2005?
>
>