Why does my SQL Server use AWE memory? and why is this not visible in RAMMap?

Posted by Marnix Klooster on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Marnix Klooster
Published on 2013-11-29T09:09:35Z Indexed on 2014/05/31 15:32 UTC
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Filed under:

memory

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sql-server

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sysinternals

We have a Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit) 8GB server where, according to Sysinternals RAMMap, 2GB of memory is allocated using AWE. As far as I understood, this means that these pages stay in physical memory and are never pushed out. This causes other apps to be pushed out of physical memory.

In RAMMap, on the Physical Pages tab, the Process column is empty for all of the AWE pages.

We run SQL Server on that box, but (through SQL Server Management Studio, under Server Properties -> Memory, under Server memory options) it says is configured not to use AWE.

However, when stopping SQL Server, the AWE pages are suddenly gone. So it really is the culprit.

So I have three questions:

Why does RAMMap not know/show that a SQL Server process is responsible for that AWE memory?
Why does SQL Server Management Studio say that AWE memory is not used?
How do we make configure SQL Server to really not use AWE memory?

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