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Question
Tuesday, April 19, 2011 7:51 PM | 1 vote
this is a vmware vm running 2008 R2 server with file services with 8 GB of RAM at 95 percent usage.
The memory usage by processes doesn't add up to 7.5 GB and the active memory on the vm is only 1.2 GB.
I expect this behaviour in Exchange but not a file server. Any idea why windows 2008 is reporting 95 percent usage. The page file is 8.3 GB.
The memory\pages/sec is 205 on average.
Thanks!
All replies (23)
Wednesday, April 20, 2011 4:19 AM
The memory usage by processes doesn't add up to 7.5 GB and the active memory on the vm is only 1.2 GB.
how are you determing that? basically, what counter are you adding? If you are using Task Manager, try switching to Resource Monitor instead, for a better view of memory
Wednesday, April 20, 2011 8:30 AM | 1 vote
Hi,
As SJB99 said, have a look on Resource Monitor to check which process using a high rate memory.
Here is an article for how to use Resmon, you can check for reference.
Please Note: Since the web site is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.
Shaon Shan |TechNet Subscriber Support in forum |If you have any feedback on our support, please contact [email protected]
Wednesday, April 20, 2011 3:29 PM
Thanks for the comments.
We added more memory and after a reboot the usage went from 7 GB to 4 GB. If memory was properly utilized, I would expect it to still use 7 GB.
Resource Monitor is a good tool but I suspect there's a memory leak in 2008.
Any known issues related to file servers?
Thursday, April 21, 2011 5:11 AM
Check your task manager and find out the process that is leaking memory.
Then, look at the UMDH tool which is used to troubleshoot memory leak issue on that specific process. Look at this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/268343
Or a full memory dump can tell what's going on.
Tim CHEN
God Bless!
Monday, April 25, 2011 1:19 AM
If there is any progress or any new question please let us know.Shaon Shan |TechNet Subscriber Support in forum |If you have any feedback on our support, please contact [email protected]
Monday, April 25, 2011 8:53 PM
I have a 2008 R2 file server that is doing this as well. Has 4GB of RAM, and is almost always 95% (or higher) on memory utilization.
Resource Monitor shows that 3925MB are "In Use", and 169MB are "Cached". Looking at the memory used under the process list doesn't come anywhere close to 4GB.
Performance seems OK, but the numbers in Resource Monitor and Task Mangler don't look right. A reboot will get the "In Use" number down, but it rapidly rises and consumes nearly all the RAM in the machine. Like previous poster said this behavior is more like SQL Server than a file server.
Apparently this is the reason: http://wasthatsohard.net/ (if the link has changed, here's the gist of it). Although it appears even with 4 or 8GB of RAM, the metafile will suck up all available RAM, much like SQL Server)
This is where I found the cause of the “memory leak”. As per Technet “ Metafile is part of the system cache and consists of NTFS metadata. NTFS metadata includes the MFT as well as the other various NTFS metadata files (see How NTFS Works for more details, and of course Windows Internals is a great reference). In the MFT each file attribute record takes 1k and each file has at least one attribute record. Add to this the other NTFS metadata files and you can see why the Metafile category can grow quite large on servers with lots of files.” After adding 1 GB of RAM to my server, the Metafile stabilized to 1.5 GB of allocated memory.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011 4:25 PM
Can Microsoft confirm what TheDesolateOne is saying?
Memory is now 8.9 GB in use, on it's way back to 95%, I suspect, despite going from 8 GB to 12 GB.
Monday, May 2, 2011 6:13 PM
Ouch! I guess there's no point in me going from 4GB to 8GB then if you're still seeing it going from 8GB to 12GB!
Monday, May 9, 2011 10:10 PM
I'm seeing the same behavior, Win 2008 R2 file server running under VMware ESX is currently consuming 9.23 GB and growing, ~ 60 % CPU usage. Page file is 16.5 GB. Performance is starting to degrade.
Thursday, May 19, 2011 7:53 PM
We updated to SPI and have seen some improvement. Memory is around 75%.
Friday, September 23, 2011 1:51 PM
i have several win2008r2 servers experiencing this same problem. ran rammap on them and sure enough the metafile is consuming an enormous portion of the memory. these are basic file servers, hyland onbase servers and arcgis maps servers. basically, servers with lots of files! so far have not been able to find a solution other than a reboot which is only a very temporary fix. once the ram capacity is max'd out in the server you are screwed. why does the metafile have to be marked active? i thought this was only for caching and should be marked as standby? please fix soon MS :)
Thursday, October 20, 2011 7:12 PM | 1 vote
Rexif,
The Metafile category in RamMap is a reference to memory used by directories, NTFS metadata files (e.g. MFT), and paging files.
In regards to the Cache behavior, you might consider applying the following kernel update. This update contains some fixes for the Cache Manager that may help.
979149 A computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 becomes unresponsive when you run a large application
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;979149
-Nagorg
Monday, November 14, 2011 12:48 PM
Question - is this hotfix still valid on 2008 R2 SP1, as the server I've got with this 'issue' is on SP1 now and as it's production I'd rather not discover afterwards that it's not 100% happy with SP1 for 2008 R2.
Thanks,
Jake
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 12:05 PM
I took a look at that hotfix and it says that its not compatible with my OS, Server 2008 R2 standard with SP1. So that hotfix is of no use.
I'm having the same issue with metafile memory usage on a file server containing 6million files spread across 600k folders.
We increased memory from 6GB to 12GB but still have the issue. Based on what i've read about the metafile, it seems logical that throwing more memory at this should resolve the problem as it will eventually have enough physical memory to store the required metafile data, its just a case of how much is enough? Our next step would be to go to 18GB and see what happens, but this is still hoping rather than knowing.
Has anyone had any definitive answers or perhaps know of a tool that might calculate memory requirements for x number of files, or tell you what number you should be able to hold with a given amount of RAM to be able to calculate this?
Monday, April 16, 2012 8:14 PM
We are having the same issue on our Windows 2008 R2 VM running on ESX 4.1. The CPU usage is being caused by the File server resource manager service as soon as it is stopped the cpu goes down.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012 6:35 PM
So Any concrete answer to this question?
Did that Hotfix do anything? What about the SP1?
I am experiencing this issue.
Monday, September 10, 2012 6:26 PM
Same issue here, file server with 8GB. file server with many files. 95% utilization.
hyper V VM. Server 2008 R2 SP1.
Thursday, October 4, 2012 6:52 PM
So I had same issue with multiple 2008R2 servers, OS was reporting 8GB used, I have
increased to 12 and it went to 12GB used. After comparing performance graph on
ESX host I noticed that one shows only hitting 4.25GB used. Even esx host had
12GB assigned on that machine. I have looked under "resource" tab for
that server and it was capped to 4.25GB, increasing to 12 or just putting
checkmark to "unlimited, you will see in minutes memory graph going down.<o:p></o:p>
Wednesday, November 27, 2013 4:53 PM
Any solution for this issue?
Monday, December 23, 2013 4:50 PM
We're running Windows Server 2008 SP2 x64 with 48GB RAM. The server is part of a SQL Cluster running SQL Server 2008 SP3 x64. AWE isn't enabled within SQL and SQL is set to be able to use up to 42GB memory. Memory utilization on this machine is showing as 98% in Task Manager even though SQLServr.exe is only taking about 800MB. In Task Manager the running processes for all users only total about 2.1GB.
I ran RAMMap and it shows AWE as taking up the majority of the memory. Is this by design? Would much rather see the Task Manager reflect the true memory utilization rather than what it's showing to me right now.
Thursday, April 21, 2016 11:31 AM
Pretty much a similar scenario in our setup. The SQL server only displayed using ca 700mb of memory but the task manager displayed a 98% RAM usage. What helped was to manually set a "maximum server memory" option for the SQL server - the default was 2147483647 MB. This in turn allowed the SQL server to allocate all the available memory and everything else crawled to a halt.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178067.aspx
Thursday, May 11, 2017 12:09 PM | 1 vote
I know this is a very old thread, but I wanted to share the resolution that worked for me in my environment since this is the first thread that showed up when I searched.
In our environment, the Event Viewer logs (Security) had grown to several GB's and was consuming the ram. We cleared the logs and adjusted the maximum log size and the problem was resolved.
Saturday, July 22, 2017 4:03 AM
I know this is a very old thread, but I wanted to share the resolution that worked for me in my environment since this is the first thread that showed up when I searched.
In our environment, the Event Viewer logs (Security) had grown to several GB's and was consuming the ram. We cleared the logs and adjusted the maximum log size and the problem was resolved.
Thanks JayKno,
Worked just as you described. Clearing the sec log & configuring max log rotation to 2048 KB dropped my Svr2008(R2) memory utilization from 95% of 8GB to 5% utilization.
PS>no such thing as a old thread....thank you!