- Posted by miketeye on July 4, 2008
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If you run SBS 2k3 R2 like I do and have the premium version, ISA server 2004 will be installed by default (OEM). On such a box, I noticed high memory usage by an sqlserver process in task manager. Problem is because there are no process ID's in task manager, it is difficult to tell which instance of sqlserver was the culprit. To solve that mystery, I had to rely on the tool set developed by Mark Russinovich and his buddies at SysInternals. Among the toolset is a utility called Process Explorer (procexp.exe). I run this program and double clicked on all the sqlserver instances running and was able to view the process image by clicking the image tab on the properties dialog. I was then able to identify the sqlserver instance using up to 500Meg on the SBS box as MSSQL$MSFW, which is the MSDE instance for ISA server logging.
After identifying the culprit, the second stage is dealing with the high memory usage. For that, since it's a SQL server instance, I was able to use SQL server Management Studio (You could also use Enterprise Manager Or even Management Studio express) to connect to the database instance, right click on the instance icon, select properties. In the properties dialog, select the Memory tab/link either at the left side or at the top of the dialog. In the memory settings, Change the "Maximum server memory (in MB) setting from the default high figure to say 256. Click OK.
NB: You will have to play with the settings to see what value works well for other services running on the box. In my case 256 did the trick. May be different figure in your case, but the solution remains the same.
Also, note that if you set this too low, ISA server will not function properly and might affect network connectivity. As a side issue, this presented itself in my case where Remote Web Desktop Connection built into SBS stopped working. I could connect to workstations using normal Remote Desktop Connection (RDC), but not via the RWW interface. I then adjusted the memory setting upwards and restarted ISA Service, then bingo, the RDC via RWW started working again.