Sometimes you can have a slugy server.  And still in this time (2010) there are applications that somehow have a memory leak.

I had this recently with a new datawarehouse application.

The symptons where that virtualcenter started swapping memory and started ballooning. Also the % commited bytes in use (memory\% committed bytes) for the system was very high.

 

You can easily find out if an application is leaking by checking the following performance counters in windows.

 

Open up System Monitor and monitor the following system wide performance counters over time:

• Paging File\% Usage

• Paging File\%

• Memory\Pool Nonpaged Bytes

• Memory\Pool Paged Bytes

If any one of these counters continually increase over time it is possible that an application may be leaking memory. To view recent history for these performance counters you can use the following view:

If the system appears to be leaking memory, the specific application can be identified by monitoring the following counters for each running process using System Monitor:

• Process\Page File Bytes

• Process\Pool Nonpaged Bytes

• Process\Pool Paged Bytes

• Process\Private Bytes

• Process\Thread Count

If a consistent and significant increase in any of these counters is observed it may be necessary to contact the application vendor for support.