Applications and increased RAM

[vallan]

Please can someone explain if this is correct?

There are times when the application on the server is not configured to be able to use the entire RAM or speed on the hardware is it installed on.

The reason I am asking is that we have an application on a server and they keep increasing the hardware RAM to fix something with the application. But I am thinking I have heard somewhere that if the application is not written to take advantage of the increased RAM. adding more RAM will not make a difference. Is this correct?

Any other info to support this?

 

[itsp1965]

Depends on the app. A true "well behaved" 32-bit application will use as much as there is available without interfering with the functionality of the OS (unless designed differently).

Is this a homegrown application or off the shelf? I am somewhat concerned by the fact that you get incremental improvements with the addition of more memory without realizing what are the actual requirements.

It's possible the application has components (OCX, DLLs) or is using an JVM (Java VM) which could be sucking memory dry
If you can't talk to your vendor, try running some of the performance monitoring tools available on the MS sysinternals site in order to gauge how exactly memory is being used in regards to this app.

HTH