Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of ie0
ie0Flag for United States of America

asked on

Windows SBS 2011 Performance monitoring

With Windows 2008 and below I have opened Task Manager - Performance and looked at the Memory usage to find out if it is getting close to the actual RAM installed and therefore paging too much and slowing down the server.
With SBS 2011 Exchange now takes all available ram for itself so I cannot used Task Manager to look at RAM usage.
How do I know if I have enuough ram in SBS 2011 to prevent paging and therefore a slow server?
Avatar of Larry Struckmeyer MVP
Larry Struckmeyer MVP
Flag of United States of America image

It would have been helpful for us to answer the qestion... do I have enough RAM, if you had said how much you have.

Task Manager should always open.  What indication do you have that insufficient RAM is keeping it from opening?

SBS 2011 will work with 8 GB RAM with few users, is happier with 12, and does very well at 16.  For extensive use by over say 25 users, you may want to consider 24 or 32 GB of RAM.

It is possible to throttle the RAM used by SQL services, and it can be done for Exchange, but only if necessary.
Avatar of ie0

ASKER

Fly, yes my question is "do I have enough ram"
I have 16GB and the server is very slow, at the console and from the clients.
How do I know if I have enough ram?
Still don't know enough.  How many clients?  What server side intensive applications are in use?  How much email is used?

There are other causes of "slowness", the most likely ones are the disk subsystem and CPU, although CPU is not the top of the list.  

On board RAID controllers and 7200 RPM SATA drives will feel much slower at the console than dedicated controllers and 15K SAS drives.

AV Scanning can be another.

You did not say what indication you had that the lack of RAM is preventing you from using task manager.
Avatar of ie0

ASKER

Fly, I can access Task Manager no problem.
I would like to know who to tell if I am running out of ram?
Thanks.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Larry Struckmeyer MVP
Larry Struckmeyer MVP
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial