So far I touched on subjects that have been widely discussed in the industry. Today I would like to talk about a subject that you would hardly find information about:  memory pressure..  On a surface the subject appears simple but in reality this is not the case.


There are two types of memory pressure a process can be exposed to external and internal. To maximize its performance and reliability a process might want to react to both of them. External memory pressure might cause a process and whole system go into paging . Internal memory pressure might cause OOM conditions and eventual process's crash.


External memory pressure is controlled by Windows, operating system. There are two types of external memory pressure such as physical dynamic memory pressure and physical “static” memory pressure. The latter type happens when a system runs out of page file. This type of memory pressure might drive the whole system into OOM condition. You might have seen those pop ups in the right corner indicating that system runs low on virtual memory. In order to detect this type of pressure one needs to monitor the size of page file. Usually applications don’t do it.


The external dynamic memory pressure rises when Windows runs low on free RAM and about to start trimming existing working sets on the box, i.e paging. A process can monitor this type of pressure by leveraging memory resource notification API described here  An application can have dedicated thread that listens on memory resource notifications. Keep in mind that these notificaitons are global, i.e. they are shared by all processes. There are two types of memory resource notifications that a thread can wait on: memory high and memory low. Before Windows starts paging it will turn on low memory resource notificaion. Applications’ threads that waiting on such notification will be waken up and given opportunity to shrink process’s memory usage before OS comes into the picture. This is very useful for highend services that have better idea than the operating system about their memory usage and what needs to be shrunk. Once memory goes back to normal Windows unsets the low memory resource notification. As you might expect, when Windows thinks there is a plenty of memory on the box, it turns on memory high resource notification. If both of the memory resource notifications are not set it means that system is in stable state and processes shouldn’t either grow or shrink.


There are two types of internal memory pressure such as physical memory pressure and Virtual Address Space, VAS, pressure. Depending on its memory manager there are several ways for a process to get into physical internal memory pressure. For example external pressure might cause a process to shrink. This might trigger process’s releasing memory which in its turn will trigger internal memory pressure. The other possibility to get into this type of pressure is if an administrator sets memory limits for a process. Once max is reached process will get into internal memory pressure. Usually application recovers from this type of pressure by shrinking internal caches and pools back to its memory manger. In cases when there is no external memory pressure there is no reason to free this memory back to operating system.  


VAS pressure is the most difficult one to detect and react to. VAS pressure could happen due to two reasons. The first reason is VAS fragmentation. It happens when  a process might have plenty of VAS regions but there is no a VAS region of a given size available. Currently there is no easy way to detect largest free VAS region. One could try to allocate a VAS region of given size to identify VAS pressure state. Be careful though, periodic attempt to allocate a VAS region of large sizes, say 4MB, might cause VAS fragmentation. This will happen if some component in the process keeps on allocating and caching VAS regions of smaller sizes, for example threads. The second reason for VAS pressure is the whole VAS could be consumed. In this case any VAS allocation fails. High-end servers have to be able to deal with VAS pressure especially on 32 bit platforms. Not recovering from VAS pressure might cause first process's  slowing down and then terminating. When an application detects VAS pressure it could react to it the same way as to internal physical pressure by shrinking caches and pools. In addition a process might decide to shrink thread pools, remove shared memory regions, unload dlls and etc…


To correctly handle all types of memory pressure you will need to build special infrastructure. As it turns out this type of infrastructure is not simple. Just consider different states your process can be in at the same time. For example Windows might indicate that there is plenty of external RAM, enabling your process can grow, but at the same time your process can hit internal physical or VAS pressure. 


There are several implementation caveats that you need be aware of when implementing such infrastructure.  If your process slow enough to react to external pressure Windows will page your process out. Then it will turn off low memory resource. Once it seesm that there is plenty of memory it will turn on high memory resource. In this case you might see that high is on and start allocating more memory even though your process is paged out. This might cause your process to page against itself. It seems that when deciding to grow you need to take your working set into account, please remember neither AWE pages nor large pages are part of working set so you have to be really careful. The other caveat is when running low on paging file, Windows won’t turn on low memory resource even though it is about to return OOM for next memory requests. In addition keep in mind that your well behaved application can be affected by a bad one that doesn’t care about memory state on the box at all.


Understanding memory pressure should really help you when we will be discussing SQL Server memory manger. Moreover having this knowledge should help you to administrate SQL Server and other applications sharing a box


I will be glad to hear your comments J


Have a nice day!