Press "Enter" to skip to content

Enabling Large Memory Pages in SQL Server

David Klee talks us through large memory pages:

SQL Server Enterprise Edition can leverage large memory pages to reduce the amount of memory pointers required for larger SQL Server deployments. Reducing the number of pointers makes the database engine more efficient, especially for SQL Servers with greater than 32GB of RAM. A normal memory block is 4KB, and many thousands of pointers are required to manage the memory underneath a larger SQL Server. Large memory pages can change the block size to 2MB, greatly reducing the number of pointers required for memory management.

Read on to see what effect this has, as well as when to use them and—more importantly—when not to use them.