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A large amount of memory is committed to applications and processes.

Posted by bb on Thursday 14th of January 2010 at 10:31 am;.
Filed Under IT Tipz & Trix

This is a fairly common alert issued by SBS. The whole alert looks like

A large amount of memory is committed to applications and processes. Consistently high memory usage can cause performance problems.

To determine which processes and applications are using the most memory, use Task Manager. Monitor the activity of these resources over a few days. If they continue to use a high level of memory and are less critical processes or services, try stopping and then restarting them.

You can disable this alert or change its threshold by using the Change Alert Notifications task in the Server Management Monitoring and Reporting taskpad.

Whilst there are lots of very good posts on dealing with issues about sqlserver taking a lot of physical memory, this post is geared towards what happens if taskmanager shows that services.exe is taking too much memory.

From a command prompt we type tasklist /svc :

tasklist /svc output

From this we can see that services.exe is running Eventlog and PlugPlay. Let’s have a look at Eventlog. Firstly we can fire up the Event Viewer. We get this :

Event Viewer

Wow – look at the size of the security log. According to Microsoft the default size of the log should be 16Mb.

Reducing the size of the security log requires clearing it, so if you need to, make sure you back it up first. I have encountered this problem a couple of times and each time it has been because the security log size was increased to track something and the size not reduced afterwards.

As soon as the size was reduced, services.exe stopped consumming so much memory and the alerts stopped.

To reduce the size of the log, right click on the log in the left hand panel that you wish to change, and select properties. You should then see this window :