Memory usage for sql server

[shaili]

Hi,

One of the production box running only sql server application, is showing 80% memory usage on the task manager-memory usage history right now.

We are running sql server 2000 standard version-sp3 with 2GB memory on this box. Server is not on the scheduled reboot at this point.

We have seen this behavior for this box last month that after task manager showing 90% memory usage contantly for several days, when server was manually rebooted, memory usage dropped to 35%. Now it's back to 80%.

Our DBA thinks that server should be rebooted on a regular schedule regardless of memory problem. Our network admin doesn't seem to agree with this. He is not ready to reboot the machine even with this high memory usage.

There is no noticable difference performancewise yet.

My questions are:
Is it bad that memory usage reaches from 35% constant to 80-90% or is it common? Should sql server be rebooted immediately to take care of it? Should sql server 2000 rebooted on regular basis regardless of any problems? Shouldn't sql server be releasing memory back to the OS even without rebooting? How do I find out whether server actually is going through memory problems and what is causing it?

Thanks in advance for your opinions,

Shaili

[rmiao]

If it's dedicated sql server, let's go. It leaves around 4mb memory for other processes if you let system manages memory dynamically, it's the way it works. System caches data and code in memory to speed up performance. If you reboot server, system has to load data from disk and generates query execution plans again. That takes time and has performance hit.

[shaili]

Here are some numbers from task manager:

Physical Memory (k):

Total available: 2096624
available : 118448
system cache: 136056

Commit Charge (k):

Total : 3359088
Limit : 4037704
Peak : 3364360

Kernel Memory (k):

Total : 74592
paged: 62484
Non-paged:12108

[rmiao]

Looks fine for dedicated sql server.