Allocated Memory Alerts Redux

If you haven’t checked out Susan’s post on Allocated Memory Alerts, you absolutely should. I did. A long time ago. But I wasn’t too concerned because I didn’t have too many sites running SQL and ISA on the SBS box. And the one that I did have wasn’t generating the Allocated Memory Alerts, so I filed this away under the “might need to know later” file.

Good thing I did. Here’s what happened:

One of my clients started generating the Allocated Memory Alerts. They’re not running ISA (yet), but they do have full SQL for Great Plains, and they just recently installed FileMaker 7 on the server as well. So I kind of expected that memory might be running a little tight, so I waited a couple of weeks before I looked into it more closely.

I finally connected and followed Susan’s instructions and found the offending culprit. One of the MSSQL processes was using almost 400MB of RAM, but it wasn’t one of the usual suspects. It wasn’t Great Plains, it wasn’t FileMaker, it certainly wasn’t the Firewall service (no ISA, remember). It was the LevelPlatforms Managed Workplace service.

That certainly didn’t seem right, given the size of the organization, etc. So I opted to follow Susan’s instructions and throttle the max memory on that process to see what happened.

Surprise, surprise, as soon as I made the changes, the amount of memory allocated to MSSQL$MW dropped significantly. We’ll know in time if I set the max level too low, but I can’t believe that it will really need more than the 100MB max I set through osql.