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Memory Pages Per Second very high at times

  • 6 June 2022
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K
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We have Microsoft System Center Operations Manager monitoring our Commvault media agents.

Periodically they trigger a memory pages per second alert.  The default threshold for the SCOM alert to be triggered is the number must value must exceed 5000 for 12 samples 5 minutes a part.  These go away after awhile so I assume it is some specific activity or job that triggers this.  We get the alerts on pretty much all of our media agents.

Our media agents have partitioned global DDB’s on each of them and they process most of our backup jobs.  We four media agents for our primary site and two at our offsite location that we Aux Copy all of our jobs (storage policy copies) to the pair offsite.

The basic Microsoft product knowledge states the alert typically occurs if you are swapping to PageFile to frequently and it can indicate that you do not have enough RAM.

In our case we have 64 GB of RAM on each media agent and the PageFile is set to system managed but it is currently only 4 GB in size and not growing.

Does anyone know if this normal behavior for a media agent or do we need to allocate more RAM or adjust the PageFile configuration for our media agents?

Spot checking our media agents they have between 10-20 GB of RAM in use at the moment but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t jump much higher during some specific task.

 

Thank you,

Kevin

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Best answer by KevinH 13 June 2022, 18:45

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M
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Hi Kevin,

64GB of RAM is what we require for “Large” or smaller MA’s so I don’t think you need more memory: - https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/111985_hardware_specifications_for_deduplication_mode_01.html#cpuram

We don’t really have any recommendations for the Pagefile configuration specifically, but it I’d expect a busy MA to be using more than 4GB of the pagefile so it does sound a bit low.

I’d recommend as a test, manually increasing it to something higher on one of the MAs, maybe 12GB and see if this prevents the alert from re-occurring.

 

K
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We adjusted it higher earlier today.  We are still getting some alerts.  Initially it feels like less alerts, but we are still getting some.

I don’t think this is causing any performance issues, at least none that are obviously apparent.  We are doing some due diligence in case a lot of PageFile swapping might be a sign of some issue.

Thank You,

Kevin

K
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For anyone that might run into this in the future.  The default Microsoft SCOM alerts for Memory Pages Per Second were being triggered on our Commvault Media Agents.  We did some due diligence and could not tweak the PageFile to resolve these alerts or find any indication of why these alerts could be a problem.  We setup an override in SCOM to ignore those alerts on our Commvault Media Agents.

Mike Struening RETIRED
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@KevinH , thanks for sharing!  To confirm, it wasn’t so much a Media Agent issue as it was SCOM being overly cautious?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-struening

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