Can you have too much RAM in a server 4

[betanet]

We have four new servers, all Dell PowerEdge 6850,s, two Xeon processors, 1000Gb of space and 4Gb of DDR2 RAM. The problem I am having is that on a regular basis the servers will give the error message that the system does not have enough system resources to complete the operation. This may be as simple as running the command prompt to cause this error. The only remedy is to reboot the server. I was told that it my be caused by too much RAM on the server and that there is a registry edit to resolve this. I haven’t been able to find a solution to this problem as of yet, can anyone throw some light on this.
Many thanks in advance.

 

[Knutern]

Have a look at these documents

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328882/

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291988/

Cheers
Knutern

 

[biglebowski]

This could be a pagefile problem. We have our servers running 16GB RAM for Oracle and don't have any problems. Are you running any special apps that could be eating up the memory?

Merry non denominational winter festival!!!

 

[betanet]

I have change the page file on all the servers, this didn't help. One of our servers is running Exchange (knutern) I may use the 3Gb switch on that server. All the servers had to be rebooted this morning and Exchange wouldn't work, this was the first thing I had to face with a Tuesday morning hangover (someone kill me)
Cheers for the help.

 

[technome]

Leave task manager open on the "process" tab, go to view , select colums, check off all items.
Watch peak CPU useage, memory usage, handle count.
Which process(s) continue to increase memory or handle count

Any possibility this server has a virus or malware ?
What software packages are running resident on the server?


........................................
Chernobyl disaster..a must see pictorial

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm

 

[betanet]

This problem happens once every 10-14 days, so it wouldn't be practical to use Task Manager at the moment. We use Kaspersky AntiVirus and don’t have any mailware. I do regular scans. This problem is happening with all of the servers (4), they are only 5 months old and they all have the same speck. I think my best bet will be to call Dell server support on this one.
Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[biglebowski]

I don't know if this will help but theres a section about exchange

http://www.computerperformance.co.u...plication_servers_e.g._Exchange,_SQL_or_Web__

Merry non denominational winter festival!!!

 

[technome]

Dell support would be a good move

Task manager would still useful, all processes should use a certain amount of memory, peaking and dropping back, but should remain at a certain range of memory. Any process which continues to grow is leaking.
There are useful tools over at Sysinternals

http://www.sysinternals.com/

Before calling Dell I would run Spybot and Ewido; safe, I have them on all my servers.

........................................
Chernobyl disaster..a must see pictorial

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm

 

[betanet]

Thanks for all the help, I have just downloaded ExBPA (Exchange best practice analyser tool) tool from Microsoft, I have been assured that this should do the trick. I will keep this post updated for future reference.

Regards,
Betanet

 

[xmsre]

1. The wording of the error "system does not have enough system resources to complete the operation" would lead me to believe it's an issue with either non paged pool or PTEs. For PTEs, you can use perfmon to check the memory - free system page table entries counter. You want to see a value consistently above 9000. For non paged pool, use poolmon to detect a leak.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/177415/en-us

2. If you are running Windows 2003 SP1, a new feature called Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is enabled by default. When DEP is enabled the PAE kernal is loaded, which can cause problems for Exchange. For Exchange with over 1GB of RAM, you want to use /3GB /USERVA=3030 /NoExecute=optout in the boot.ini

 

[betanet]

Thanks xmsre, that was spot on. I have already got it sorted, thanks to the ExBPA tool and yourself. Thank you everyone for all the help.

Cheers to all,
Betanet