Technical Q about Navision and system ram

orbitalsalmon

We're running 3.70, and I was casually looking at the task manager going through the various processes when I noticed that SERVER.EXE process was taking up 640,000k (640mb) of memory. There were two instances of SLAVE.exe, one at 270,000k (270mb) and another at 48,000k (40mb)

Then i looked at the physical memory available on our server and it was only 50,000k (50mb) out of 1 gigabyte of total system RAM.

These processes are all related to Navision's database component, I just didn't realize it was such a resource hog!

My questions are:

1) What is the difference between SLAVE.EXE and SERVER.EXE?
2) Why are there (2) instances of SLAVE.EXE?
3) Is it normal for Navision to take up this much memory? (We have 1.0gb of RAM total)
4) Will adding another gig of ram alleviate this? Or does Navision scale its memory hogging at a percentage of the available RAM?

thanks,
Jon

Ian_piddignton

Hi Jon

Server.exe is the server program that teh clients are connecting to. Slave.exe is the process that actually handles writting to the database. You typically get one slave per database part and sometime an extra one(not too surte why the extra one pops up)

Navision server will grab all the memory assign to it in its cache. If no one told it how much it was allowed during installation it would have grabbed approxamatly 2/3 rds for the RAM. Once this set navision will alway grab that much.

Navision Server can only handle a cache of 1GB officially although there are often issues getting it over 800Mb. So adding another Gb of RAm won't do much for Navision although other process on the server may thank you.

You can refine the amount of memory Navision hogs. The installation manual says that each user uses 2-8 Mb of Navision cache depending on what it is doing. So you could use this as a good base. but if Navision is performing well I'd be tempted to leave well alone.

hope that helps

Ian

orbitalsalmon

That does answer a lot of question Ian, thank you.

Now is there a way to specify how much memory Navision server will grab AFTER the installation?

dick11

You can find such information in your pdf's.
But let me help you:
Add the parameter "cache=xxx" where xxx is the amount of memory in Kb.