SQL Server 2000 Memory Issues

Dear All,

We have a Windows 2003 Enterprise server with SQL Server 2000 Enterprise on it. This has the AWE settings for 'max memory setting' to 5120MB. This server has 6GB of memory, or rather about 5.8GB due to PAE. From yesterday morning the server has become almost unresponsive when the SQL service is running, and pretty much all the memory, ie < 1MB on average is listed as being free.

The database has been growing constantly and is now 46GB, with database file size of 67GB.

We moved the database onto a new box which was being prepared for another service, and this has 8GB or ram and no AWE settings. It is running fantastic.

We are going to rebuild the original box and the SAN structure, but I want to do some fiddling before we do. I was going to set awe-enabled to 0 to see if that setting was allowing the OS to have no memory, but from reading http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2000/maintain/failclus.mspx it says If AWE is enabled and is taking too much memory, SQL Server must be shut down to reconfigure it, causing downtime (which makes a high availability option such as failover clustering less available). Because the memory pages used by the instance of SQL Server are taken from the nonpageable pool of Windows memory, none of the memory can be exchanged. This means that if the physical memory is filled up, SQL Server cannot use the page file set up on a physical disk to account for the surplus in memory usage. How do you reconfigure AWE settings if the SQL service is shutdown?

Also, how can I figure out whether the server is deficient in physical RAM, or it is just a 'max memory' setting we need to tweak, or is it just trial and error?

Incase it might help, we have ~3 meaningful DB's on the server apart from 'master'. One is an archive DB ~80GB, one is ~5MB and the live DB which is the size mentioned above. Unfortunately I don't know table sizes.

Pax