Hi,
I have a SQL Server 2008 in production environment (Windows 2003 -64 bit) and it is consuming 10 GB memory of installed 20GB. Is this normal behavior or is there anything wrong with the configuration ?
P.S. I have hosted one web application which is used by hundreds of users concurrently everyday .
There is nothing wrong with that behavior, SQL is just caching your data. If there is something else you'd like to use that memory for you can configure SQL Server to use less, however, configuring it that way may make queries slower.
Microsoft has adopted the strategy for memory management that any unused memory is wasted memory. Microsoft's newer OS's and SQL Server versions will allocate more memory for caching, until the system requests it for other purposes.
So, what you are seeing is probably normal.
Much of that allocated memory can be released to other applications as needed. As distressing as that memory usage may seem, it is not as dire a situation as it may appear.
SQL Server reserves memory which is why you are seeing high peaks. It might show up as using 10GB in your Task Manager, but the real memory usage can be checked from within the Management Studio.
Also, you can establish upper and lower limits to the amount of memory (buffer pool) used by the SQL Server database engine with the min server memory and max server memory configuration options.
Check this article out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321363