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Memory for Windows 2000 Server

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by mike.peck

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I have a Gateway 6400 server running Windows 2000 Server and SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition (SP-1). The server has a single Pentium III 1 GHz processor and 256 MB of RAM. There is an 18 GB SCSI drive partitioned into 2 NTFS volumes of 3 GB and 15 GB. Windows 2000 server is on the 3 GB partition while SQL 2000 is on the 18 GB partition.
The clients access seems to be a little sluggish. The 5 client PCs range from Pentium II 400 MHz to 700 MHz Celerons.
The SQL database is about 750 MB insize.
I would like some recomendations on:
How much RAM should this server have?
What should the Virtual Memory settings be?
Is there any tweeking I can do to the server to speed thing up?
Thanks,
Mike Peck

3 replies

by krkosiorek

One thing that you might want to try is setting up a performance monitor to see how much of the cpu and memory are being used at any one given time. This will give you an idea if you need more memory.

That being said, more RAM, to a certain extent, is always better (my opinion). Most servers that I work with have between 512MB and 2GB.

I believe that the recommended virtual memory size is min=1.5xRAM and max=3xRAM.

You may gain a performance increase if you set the page file to bemin=3xRAM and max=3xRAM. This way, the machine will not spend processor time resizing the page file. Also, if possible, put the page file on a separate partition that is 3xRAM. Set the file to use the whole partition.

Hope this helps.

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