Establishing a Baseline for Memory
After determining that you have an adequate amount of physical memory and that your configuration is appropriate, examine your physical memory usage under a normal workload to establish a baseline or reference point for physical memory usage. The baseline is generally not a single value but a range within which physical memory usage can fluctuate and still provide acceptable performance. You can use the baseline to identify trends, such as increasing physical memory demands over time, or to recognize problems that arise from a sudden change.
To determine a baseline for your system, use the following counters to create logs of memory usage over an extended period (from several weeks to a month).
MemoryPages/sec
MemoryAvailable Bytes
Paging File(_Total)% Usage
As you monitor the values of these counters, you might see occasional spikes. Typically, you can exclude these from your baseline because it is the consistent, repetitive values with which you are most concerned; the range of values that seem to appear consistently constitutes your baseline. When values fall outside of these ranges for extended periods, follow the instructions provided in this chapter to investigate the variations.
Even if your system exceeds the minimum physical memory requirements for the operating system, you might face situations in which you do not have enough physical memory. For example, if you run several memory-intensive applications or if several users share your computer, the available physical memory of your system might be consumed, affecting your system's performance.
To see how much virtual memory your Windows 2000 Professional-based computer uses, start all applications and use Task Manager to see the Peak Commit Charge value. This value appears in the Commit Charge box on the Performance tab. Commit charge is the number of pages reserved for virtual memory that are backed by the paging file.
Peak committed memory is the highest amount of virtual memory (in bytes) that has been committed over this sample. To be committed, these bytes must either have a corresponding amount of storage available on disk or in main memory. Compare this value against the size of the paging file to determine whether the paging file is sized appropriately.
Under Computer Management, use Shared Folders under System Tools to view this information.
Default Services Memory Consumption
In general, Windows 2000 has been optimized so that only the most commonly used services run by default, and you do not have to turn off any services. However, you can reduce the memory requirements of your system by turning off some of the default services provided by the operating system. Administrators have access to Services in the Administrative Tools menu by default.
To stop a service
From the Start menu, point to Programs and Administrative Tools, and then click Services.
Right-click the name of the appropriate service, and then click Stop.
This procedure stops the service for the current session. To disable the service permanently, you need to change the value for service startup in the properties dialog box for the service. To use this dialog box, click Services in the Administrative Tools menu or in the Computer Management console. Right-click the service you want to change, select Properties in the shortcut menu, and then change the value to Disabled in the Startup type box.