Windows server 2008 driver locked memory

Yes No. Thank you! Any more feedback? The more you tell us the more we can help. Can you help us improve? Resolved my issue. Clear instructions. Easy to follow. No jargon. Pictures helped. Didn't match my screen. Bad: These are physical pages that have been marked as bad. TIP: If you have a memory leak and get to the point of almost running out of memory, the normal procedure is to reboot the machine in order to clear out the memory. Types of memory usage Process Private: Memory allocated for use only by a single process.

Shareable: Pages that have been marked as shared can be used by multiple processes. Paged Pool: Kernel pooled memory that can be paged to disk. Nonpaged Pool: Kernel pooled memory that cannot be paged to disk. Session Private: Memory that is private to a particular logged in session. Metafile: Metafile is a part of the system cache containing NTFS metadata and used to increase the performance of the file system. Usually see this usage with Hyper-V or VMware virtual machines.

Large Page: Normal page size for Windows memory is 4kb on x64 systems. But with large pages, the size is 2mb. In this snapshot, you can see that about half of the physical RAM being used is by Mapped Files: In this example, next we would click on the Physical Pages tab Now at the bottom of the tool select "Use" for the Filter and "is" select "Mapped File" from the drop down.

This will now show you all the mapped file entries. Next, I would click on the File Name column heading to group similar file names so at this point I could look to see if all the mapping were going to the same path or general path to help determine what is causing all the mapped files. Example of Logman to collect VMWare processor and memory counter: The following will configure the counters, set logging to circular with max file size of mb, and take a counter reading every 3 seconds.

Copy and paste the following command into the command prompt window: Logman. Tags: High Memory. Version history. Last update:. It is through this mechanism that Hyper-V varies the amount of available memory to a guest when Dynamic Memory is enabled. VMware uses the same process though its balloon driver to reclaim guest memory.

For most applications, this locked memory is not going to cause a problem as Hyper-V will release memory as the amount of available memory lowers the buffer threshold can be set on the guest properties.

So if you have a large chunk of driver locked memory, for a long time, it's usually a sign that something's not right. I'm going to take a wild guess here and guess that since you mentioned that it's a virtualized server, that it's the VMware balloon driver that's doing this.

I don't have enough data to be able to tell you why it's doing this, but there are plenty of cases and VMware support KBs, like this one , that specifically talk about the balloon driver erroneously retaining large amounts of memory when it shouldn't be. You also have to consider the possibility that the balloon driver is behaving as designed, and it's trying to make your server page out memory because it desperately needs to give memory to another VM on the same host.

There is yet another possibility that it is not a hypervisor dynamic memory driver at all, but instead just some rogue device driver. Drivers usually allocate memory that is "tagged" with a 3 or 4-character tag that gives a hint as to what driver was responsible for making the allocation. See if you have Dynamic Memory for your Virtual Machine enabled. Driver Locked is a figure you should concentrate on. In your specific case, Driver Locked is probably one of Hyper-V drivers, which locked all unused memory assigned to VM, but unused by it atm , so it can "give it" to some other VM configured with Dynamic Memory, or even to host OS, whichever needs it at the moment.

You can test it by opening some large file or memory-intensive app inside that virtual machine - the DriverLocked memory should go down as some other metric increases. IMHO this should not be a cause for concern if you didn't overprovision too much of your memory across all VMs. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.