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Locks In Sp_configure

Kendra Little discusses the locks entry in sp_configure:

Each lock uses 96 bytes of memory. On the instance in question, 25,000 locks  = 2,400,000 bytes.

That’s only 2.3 MB of memory devoted to locks. Even though 25K  sounds like a lot, the memory footprint for that is pretty darn small.

I checked back with our questioner, and their instance has 32GB of memory. That’s a pretty small amount in the grand scheme of things (as of SQL Server 2014, Standard Edition can use up to 128GB of memory for the Buffer Pool), but 2.3 MB isn’t anything to worry about, percentage wise.

Read on for advice if you’re seeing your SQL Server instance take a very large number of locks.