Troubleshooting Memory Shortage

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Published : September 27, 2005

If the performance of the DPM server is unacceptably slow, and you determine that a shortage of memory is a contributing factor, perform the following steps to isolate and resolve the memory shortage.

To get more information about a memory shortage

On the DPM server, use Task Manager to determine which processes are consuming the most memory. (On the Processes tab, review memory usage.) If those processes do not return to their normal performance ranges, you may need to perform additional, application-specific diagnostics to identify the cause.

Note that memory usage for the DPM instance of the SQL Server service (Sqlservr.exe) is expected to be comparatively high. (The DPM instance has the user name Microsoft$DPM$Acct.) High memory usage by Microsoft$DPM$Acct does not indicate a problem. The service normally uses a large amount of memory for caching, but releases memory when available memory is low.

To resolve the immediate problem

  1. Close DPM Administrator Console.

  2. You may want to cancel some non-critical DPM jobs and running them later, when more memory is available.

    Important

    Canceling a protection job can compromise data protection. For more information, see “How to cancel a job” (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=52007)in DPM Help.

  3. Stop and restart the DPM service and the SQL Server service. In Administrative Tools, open Services, and then restart the services by performing the following steps:

    1. Stop the DPM service if it is running. (The service stops automatically when not in use.) When you stop the DPM service, all active jobs will be canceled.

    2. Stop the SQL Server service (MSSQL$Microsoft$DPM$).

    3. Start the SQL Server service (MSSQL$Microsoft$DPM$).

    4. Restart the DPM service.

  1. Ensure that no other applications are running on the DPM server.

  2. Modify protection schedules for protection groups in order to stagger protection jobs. Consider offsetting some synchronization jobs from the beginning of the hour. For more information, see “How to modify protection options” (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=52008)in DPM Help.

  3. If high memory usage associated with DPM jobs continues to be a factor in degraded performance, consider either adding memory or offloading some of the protection workload to another DPM server. For information about memory requirements for a DPM server, see the “Planning a Deployment” chapter in the DPM 2006 Planning and Deployment Guide (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=46355).