Allocated Memory Error - how do I find the cause? (It's NOT SQL)

[lanrat]

Hi,

My 'performance report' is flagging an 'Allocated Memory Error' occuring daily (sometimes twice) around 4:00am. Obviously I'm not watching the Task Manager at that time of day and when I do check nothing is amiss.

I already took care of the dreaded SQL memory grab before so I know it's not that - can somebody tell me how I could perhaps set up some kind of log to catch this please.

Thanks,

 

[ShackDaddy]

When does your backup finish?

You know how I fix these... I go into the monitoring configuration and change the threshold of the Allocated memory alerts. I get these alerts on most of my servers, and they are always due to single spikes now and then. I either turn them off or adjust them. I usually only do the latter if I've added memory to the server, since this threshold won't go up when you add memory, you have to raise it manually. If you've added memory, you will get this far more often.

Monitoring -> Alert Notifications -> Performance Counters -> Committed Bytes.

To actually find out which process is using it, open Performance Monitor.

Go to Admin Tools -> Performance -> Performance Logs and Alerts -> Counter Log. New Counter Log. Add counters as follows: Performance Object: Process - pick the Working Set counter for each process in the processes list, not All Instances. That way each instance's use of memory will be tracked. Schedule when you want it to run, and you should be good. When you want to examine the logs, go to System Monitor in the same tool and choose to View Log Data. Point at the log file that was generated from your Counter log, and you'll be able to see what process used a lot of memory around 4am.

Dave Shackelford
Shackelford Consulting

 

[lanrat]

Thanks for advice. There is no scheduled backup running on this machine at present, niether is Exchange configured as yet.

Only things added to the basic OS install I can think of are APC UPS agent and Trend Micro AV.

I've setup the Performance Logs and Alerts as best I can from your explanation and will see what happens this next cycle.

Msrk