[dba-SQLServer] FYI - nVLDB performance

John W. Colby jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Tue Sep 14 15:07:30 CDT 2004


Francisco,

In fact all this AWE crap is nothing more than the old style EMS from early
windows days, paging of memory into an address space that the OS (the CPU
more correctly) can see.  That is one of the reasons to go full 64 bit since
that stuff is no longer required.  The overhead to use AWE is supposed to be
quite high.

I found a similar article (it might be this article) on MS but it really
didn't definitively answer how to get SQL Server using more than 2g in a
system with 3 g under Windows 2K.  Of course I don't have enterprise edition
anyway so it looks like I simply can't use more than 2G of ram.

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Francisco
Tapia
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 1:24 PM
To: dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com
Subject: Re: [dba-SQLServer] FYI - nVLDB performance


John,
  Thanks for keeping us updated... It seems logical to me since you are
running backups of your data that it may be wise to switch from FULL
loggging to SIMPLE logging now that you're doing Indexes.  This way you
don't log every event.  Additionally restriciting the size of the log to a
specific size will also help speed things along, this way SQL Server is not
tied up w/ useless things such as creating virtual page files.  In general
this is good practice, but in your case it
will be very much more needed.   I've posted as has Eric and I beleive
others, on how to do this, if you don't have the email, let me know and I'll
post again.

as far as trying to use the 4gb, you may want to take a look at this... this
will obviously help speed up performance, because up until now you've only
been using 2gb, and yes Windows 2000 natively supports 4gb, while XP is
restricted to 2gb... why? I dunno. (but that's one more reason for me to
hold on to 2000 a little longer)

http://www.sql-server-performance.com/awe_memory.asp


On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 12:45:32 -0400, John W. Colby
<jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com> wrote:
> Just to let you know some numbers on the database as it currently 
> stands.
> 
> First, I have two almost identical machines which I built to hold and 
> manipulate the database.  Both machines use an MSI K8N Neo motherboard 
> with built in 4 port SATA and dual channel IDE, gbit LAN.  The 
> processor is the 754 pin Athlon64 at 3ghz.  The server currently has 
> Windows 2K and 3g RAM installed.  Apparently Win2K can use up to 4g 
> ram whereas XP is limited to 2g.  Unfortunately I cannot persuade SQL 
> Server to use more than 2g RAM so I am not sure that more memory than 
> that is really useful in this context.
> 
> The server then has (4) 250g Maxtor SATA drives and (1) 250g Maxtor 
> IDE drive holding the data files and the log file respectively.  The 
> second machine is currently running XP Pro.  Since the two new 
> machines have gbit nics built into the motherboard I bought an 8 port 
> gbit switch so they could talk at full speed.  In general I have found 
> that I can run operations from the second machine to the server over 
> gbit LAN at close to full speed, i.e. the LAN is not a severe 
> bottleneck anymore (it definitely was at 100mbit).


-- 
-Francisco
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