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etoisarobot
Asked: 2010-06-17 10:19:57 +0800 CST

Running 32 bit SQL Server 2005 on 64 bit Windows Server?

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If I have a 32 bit version of SQL Server 2005 running on a 64 bit Windows Server does the max amount of memory avail. the SQL Server process increase from 2gb to 4gb. In reading this blog entry by Mark Russinovich in which he states that

"All Microsoft server products and data intensive executables in Windows are marked with the large address space awareness flag"

and

"Because the address space on 64-bit Windows is much larger than 4GB, something I’ll describe shortly, Windows can give 32-bit processes the maximum 4GB that they can address and use the rest for the operating system’s virtual memory."

which leads me to believe that the answer is "yes" but I not totally confident.

sql-server 64-bit

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Yes you will be able to access 4gb of ram per instance however a 64 bit version of sql server, limited to 4gb of ram would outperform the 32 bit version in most cases.

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  2. the answer is yes - your 32bit sql server should be able to use close to 4gb of ram per instance.

    don't use the /3gb switch.

    you can see the evidence from his testlimit.exe examples in the blog post that you linked to.

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