I remember asking a question at a recent training event, the outcome? I now don’t use task manager to try and understand how much memory SQL Server is consuming. Why? Well it has the ability to lie, and as you will see, it can lie really well. (Depending on settings)

Let’s look at my environment, SQL Server is running under Process ID 5548.

Right, so I am using 58% of my server memory and looking at SQL Server it is consuming approx. 105MB? Well, it’s not. It doesn’t make any sense.

Use resource monitor to really know what is going on.

Resource monitor shows:

Why this is so inaccurate (for my case) is because of the use of Lock Pages in Memory – Task manager does not track memory that is allocated using the AllocateUserPhysicalPages() API which is what this setting does.