SQL SERVER – SSMS: Memory Consumption Report

The next in line in this series of reports is the Memory Consumption Report from SQL Server Management Studio. This is a goldmine of a report in my humble opinion and lesser respected. When I used to be consulted or land into performance tuning exercises for customers in the past, there is one question that gets repeated and echoed every now and then – “My SQL Server is eating away my RAM and it is not releasing it back even in non-peak hours”. I always am smiling when this question comes up. SQL Server or for that matter any database system is highly memory oriented processes. If they had taken for some reason, then they are not going to release it because they assume at a later point in time they will require it again. So instead of depending on the OS to allocate, they go with the assumption of grabbing and never releasing even when it is not required in the interim.

Memory Consumption

Now that brings to the point the fact what is my SQL Server using this memory for? Well, if you search the internet you will be amazed by the plethora of scripts and it is overwhelming how people have killed this subject to death. But this hidden gem inside SQL Server Management Studio is never talked about. So in this blog post, let me take a tour of what this report contains and how one should read the sections.

This report can be launched by going to Server Node in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) right click > Reports > Standard Reports > Memory Consumption.

SQL SERVER - SSMS: Memory Consumption Report memconsumption1

The report has multiple sections which we would discuss one by one.

Memory Related Counters

SQL SERVER - SSMS: Memory Consumption Report memconsumption2

These three values can give us a rough indication of memory pressure on SQL Server Instance. These three values are retrieved from SQL Server Memory counters.

SELECT  OBJECT_NAME
,counter_name
,CONVERT(VARCHAR(10),cntr_value) AS cntr_value
FROM sys.dm_os_performance_counters
WHERE ((OBJECT_NAME LIKE '%Manager%')
AND(counter_name = 'Memory Grants Pending'
OR counter_name='Memory Grants Outstanding'
OR counter_name = 'Page life expectancy'))

As per perfmon counters help, “Memory Grants Outstanding” shows counter shows the current number of processes that have successfully acquired a workspace memory grantgrant, whereas “Memory Grants Pending” counter shows the current number of processes waiting for a workspace memory grant. Page life expectancy is defined as “Number of seconds a page will stay in the buffer pool without references

Top Memory Consuming Components

This section of the report shows various memory consumers (called clerks) in a pie chart based on the amount of memory consumed by each one of them. In most of the situations, SQLBUFFERPOOL would be the biggest consumer of the memory. This output is taken from sys. dm_os_memory_clerks DMV, which is one of the key DMV in monitoring SQL Server memory performance.  We can use sys.dm_os_memory_clerks to identify where exactly SQL’s memory is being consumed.

SQL SERVER - SSMS: Memory Consumption Report memconsumption3

Buffer Pages Distribution (# Pages)

This particular section of the report shows the state of buffer pages. Behind the scenes it uses DBCC MEMORYSTATUS to get the distribution of buffer in various states. Buffer Distribution can be one of the following as: ‘Stolen’, ‘Free’, ‘Cached’, ‘Dirty’, ‘Kept’, ‘I/O’, ‘Latched’ or ‘Other’. Interestingly, if we run the DBCC MEMORYSTATUS, we may not see all these states. This is because memory status output format has been constantly changing SQL 2000 (KB 271624) and SQL 2005 (KB 907877).

SQL SERVER - SSMS: Memory Consumption Report memconsumption4

Memory Changes Over Time (Last 7 Days)

This section of the report shows data from default trace. One of the event which is captured by default trace is “Server Memory Change” (Event id 81). Behind the scene, this section reads default trace, looks for event ID 81 and adds a filter (datediff(dd,StartTime,getdate()) < 7) to display last 7 days records. My laptop doesn’t have much load that why we don’t see any memory change. Another reason, as quoted in the text, of no data could be that default trace are disabled.

SQL SERVER - SSMS: Memory Consumption Report memconsumption5

I am sure in your production or active development boxes these values are not going to be zero for sure.

Memory Usage By Components

At the bottom, there is a table which shows the memory for each component.  This is also taken from the same DMV, which is used in “Top Memory Consuming Components”. The graph earlier shows top 5% consumers by name and the rest would be shown as others. It’s important to note that in SQL 2014, it would always show MEMORYCLERK_XTP which is used by In-Memory OLTP engine (even if it’s not a top consumer).

SQL SERVER - SSMS: Memory Consumption Report memconsumption6

Here is the little description of various columns:

Allocated MemoryAmount of memory allocated to sqlservr.exe
Virtual Memory (Reserved)Memory reserved in Virtual Address Space (VAS)
Virtual Memory (Committed)Memory committed in Virtual Address Space. Once memory is committed in VAS, it would have physical storage (RAM or Pagefile)
AWE Memory AllocatedAmount of memory locked in the physical memory and not paged out by the operating system
Shared Memory (Reserved)Amount of shared memory that is reserved
Shared Memory (Committed)Amount of shared memory that is committed

To understand reserve and committed, I always quote this. Imagine that you need to fly to Mumbai on a certain date and you book a flight ticket. This is called reservation. There’s nothing there yet, but nobody else can claim that seat either. If you release your reservation the place can be given to someone else. Committing is actually grabbing the physical seat on the day of travel.

Hope this gives you a fair idea about various pieces of memory consumers. As I mentioned before, this is one of those hidden gem reports that never gets seen. One can learn and know about a current running system and who are using SQL Server Memory from this report easily.

I would be curious to know if in any of your systems if there is any other component apart from BufferPool or SOSNode as the top memory consumers?

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)

SQL Memory, SQL Reports, SQL Scripts, SQL Server Management Studio
Previous Post
SQL SERVER – SSMS: Scheduler Health Report
Next Post
SQL SERVER – Beginning Contained Databases – Notes from the Field #037

Related Posts

7 Comments. Leave new

  • Thanks @Pinal..for yet another great article on Memory Usage reports..This article useful for me and also for other DB administrator ..Thanks

    Reply
  • HI,
    On our main production system I see Cachestore_Objcp as the top memory user.

    Reply
  • Pinal, thanks for the article. I have been chasing a memory pressure issue for a couple weeks now and I finally resorted to this report. (like you said, it is “less respected”). My top consumers are frequently CACHESTORE_SQLCP and USERSTORE_TOKENPERM, with CACHESTORE* usually being first but not always. however, there are no complaints on performance(amazingly yet) but I too have been assigned to “clean up” this environment. Although there is a lot of fact finding behind the applications using this db server, do you have any ideas where I can start poking around to start asking questions? I can’t insert pictures here, but just to give you some numbers: CACHESTORE_SQLCP=3522560, USERSTORE_TOKENPERM=980432. Server has 24g (SQL is holding on to 22g) and it is not running under a service account so I cannot yet use the LPIM setting. Or is it that simple that I need to enable LPIM so that SQL does not go above the max I set? Thanks for any suggestions.

    Reply
  • Hi Pinal I got a question for you, as i am new to SSMS , could you help me to create a data base for Report snap shot, that i have a sql code to generate ta report in SSMS and my requirement is to store that report snapshot daily in to a DB-DW. let me know your ideas asap.

    Reply
  • Hi Pinal. For my sql server’s “sqlbufferpool’, there is 408 ‘Allocated memory (KB)’, 16,809,984 ‘Virtual Memory Reserved (KB)’, and 13,707,008 Virtual Memory Committed (KB)’. Should I be worried about these values as they are? If bad, then what is remedy? Thanks for any consideration.

    Reply

Leave a Reply