SQL Server (VEEAMSQL2012) chewing up memory

[eddyyeah]

running win 2012r2 server, 16gb RAM veeam b&r 9.5.4.2866
i have 1 backupjob running and is very slow, noticed memory usage very high and process SQL Server (VEEAMSQL2012) is using lots of RAM. more than i feel it should be.
anyone else has similar issue?
Case # 0383535

[Gostev]

SQL Server will always grab all available physical RAM, this is by its design. This should not be a concern, as it only chews unused RAM (which otherwise would do nothing useful). In theory, you can use max server memory setting to limit the amount of memory available to SQL Server, but usually there's no point in doing so. I've never seen SQL Server causing lack of memory issues on backup servers sized according to the system requirements.

[eddyyeah]

my backups are taking literally 2 days which should take a few hours, 92% memory being used for a single file share backup, seem extreme?

[Gostev]

Wait, do you use File to Tape backup job? That's a whole different story. SQL Server will always be the bottleneck for those, and in case of large number of files to process it needs to be carefully sized.

In general, these jobs are designed for copying Veeam backup files to tape (so we're talking thousands of large files). They don't really shine at general-purpose backup of a file share with millions of small files. Which is why we don't even bother licensing them, and just giving them away for free.

[eddyyeah]

File to Tape backup job - yes. however i've noticed even when idle and no jobs running the veeeamsql2012 process is taking up a lot of RAM

[Gostev]

Yes - as per my first response, this is perfectly normal. Following tape job execution, cached tables are still kept in RAM.

[eddyyeah]

ok so throwing extra RAM in the box isn't going to help?

[Gostev]

In case of File to Tape jobs specifically it will, because unlike all other jobs these are very heavy on SQL usage due to storing file catalog there.

[Seve CH]

running win 2012r2 server, 16gb RAM veeam b&r 9.5.4.2866
i have 1 backupjob running and is very slow, noticed memory usage very high and process SQL Server (VEEAMSQL2012) is using lots of RAM. more than i feel it should be.

Hi.

In my experience as DBA, SQL server memory usage must be limited when sharing the server with other services or SQL Server instances. If you do not do so, the server will start swapping like crazy. SQL should be smart enough to avoid that, but it won't (it will complain in system event log that it is swapping). In your case, as Veeam has an uneven memory usage (memory needs change depending on running jobs), I suggest limiting the SQL server memory.

You can use perfmon to control how is your memory usage (buffer manager: page life expectancy, buffer cache hit ratio, etc.) to check if you need more or less RAM and fine-tune it.

In our case, which seems to be much larger than your system, we have these settings:
Windows 2016
SQL Server 2014 for staging: 900MB
SQL Server 2014 for Veeam: 8GB
Server total memory: 192GB.
We have no tape jobs and our top priority is to speed up ReFS operations and backup jobs (2.5GB/s).

Kind regards