Which servers are more likely to experience RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE poison waits when they run out of query workspace memory?.Which servers are more likely to experience PAGEIOLATCH waits?.Which might be due to a few factors, like not caring about the performance on older servers, or dealing with old servers built with much lower memory sizes. SQL Server 20R2 median RAM is 15% of the database size.Developer Edition: 11% (c’mon, man, let them get some memory!).Enterprise Edition: RAM is 17% of the size of the data.Standard Edition median: RAM is 23% the size of the data.So in terms of pure server size, yes, Enterprise servers are larger, but as a percentage of data, something kinda interesting happens: Developer Edition: data 111GB, RAM 16GB (poor developers).Enterprise Edition: median data size is 358GB, median RAM size is 54GB.Standard Edition median data size is 168GB, median RAM size is 32GB.Overall, Enterprise Edition servers handle larger volumes of data, and they are configured with more memory to handle it: Do Enterprise Edition servers have more memory? But still, the dropping percentages as data grows – that’s pretty steep. In our SQL Server Setup Guide, we tell folks to leave at least 4GB to the OS, and I think most sysadmins would consider 2GB to be the bare minimum. The low end percentages are a little skewed since in the 10-59GB tier, the OS memory means a lot. >600GB data: 6% RAM size (example: 2.1TB data, 128GB RAM).Servers hosting 10-59GB data: median RAM size is 74% of the data! (example: 27GB data, 20GB RAM).I split the servers into quartiles based on the size of data they’re hosting: 4.2TB of data hosted on 16GB RAM (HAHAHA).There are a lot of other factors at play, like query volume, tuning done, wait stats, etc.Ī few examples from the extreme ends of memory-vs-data-size provisioning:

These numbers are thought-provoking, but before you ask questions, think about this one: the data size vs hardware size doesn’t by itself mean that the users are happy.

219GB data hosted on a SQL Server with 15GB RAM (OS has 7% of the data size).(If I sort servers by how much data they host, the middle value is 219GB.) In servers in that range, a few include: Let’s slice it a different way, though: let’s take the median data volume out of this sample, 219GB. 84GB data hosted on a SQL Server with 16GB RAM.(Max memory size and file sizes are discussions for another blog post.) Meaning, if it’s hosting 100GB of data, it has 19GB RAM in the server. The median SQL Server has 19% of the data size as RAM.

I took last Thursday’s data for about 1,400 servers, then excluded stacked instances (multiple instances installed on the same OS), Azure SQL DB, Managed Instances, and servers with less than 10GB of data. When I look at a SQL Server, one of the first things I check is, “How much memory does this thing have relative to the amount of data we’re hosting on here?” I’ve long used some seat-of-the-pants numbers, but armed with data from SQL ConstantCare® users who opted into public data sharing, let’s do a little deeper analysis.

Free server software for 2gb ram