I wrote an application a few months ago, and was hosting it out of our offices on a workstation with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 @ 2.33GHz, 8 GB RAM, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and SQL Server 2008 Enterprise. Both the webserver and database server were run on the same machine.

We had a huge influx in traffic, and moved ClubUptime.com, and got 2 of their top teir windows VMs. The Database server runs Windows 2008 R2 Standard and SQL Server 2008 R2 Web on 8 GB ram and an Intel Xeon e5620 @ 2.40GHz.

Ever since switching, the database which used to run at around 400MB in RAM now runs at around 4-7GB, and there haven't been any changes to it (other than a couple columns here and there). Our traffic has quadrupled, and our DB is 6 GB on disk, why would SQL server take up 7 GB if the DB is only 6. And why would it be storing the ENTIRE database in memory?

Another thing is why growing 4 times in size did the database's memory footprint grow 12 times?

Last question: Why does the CPU peg at 100% now where it didn't before? The design is simple, VERY few joins, NO subqueries. I am just at a loss, unless it is the SQL server edition, or the fact that I moved from real hardware to a VM.