Quote:
Originally Posted by Rathji
If I had to randomly guess, I would think SQL is the most likely culprit, which means you can simply try restricting its RAM usage, because I believe the default install will chew up as much RAM as you have available.
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Or Exchange...but in either case, don't limit memory to these apps. Exchange 2007+ and SQL 2008+ will indeed use as much RAM as they can, but they also support API's in the OS that allow them to gracefully release memory back to the OS when there is pressure for RAM from other processes. A heavily loaded Exchange or SQL box won't swap needlessly.
Also, don't look at pagefile size as an indication of swap activity (as you noted, use perfmon) - the pagefile will often be quite large, since it has to act as the backing store for allocated virtual memory (which may or may not physically exist), but not actively utilized (or very lightly utilized).
There is a lot of art/science to memory on Windows Server 2008 that goes on behind the scenes - don't assume you* can do a better job
*edit: the general you, not the specific you..I have to stop using that term..
Find out what process is using a lot of memory, and we can explore from there.