Limiting MSDE Memory Usage

A common issue on new installs of SBS 2003 after they have been running for a few days is that some of the MSDE databases can use a lot of memory, especially if you have more than 1GB of physical RAM. You will know if you have this problem when the Server Performance Report has an Allocated Memory Critical Error.

Microsoft have published an article KB909636 about limiting memory usage for the MSFW MSDE instance but this can easily be applied to SBSMONITORING as well. I tend to allocate 100MB to each MSDE instance.

I find it easier to use Task Manager to identify the PID and memory usage of each sqlservr.exe process and then from a CMD prompt use tasklist /svc to identify the MSDE instance. Then I use the information in the KB article to limit the MSDE memory usage.