Page Life Expectancy Counter

On 30 Sep, 2015

MS SQL DBA

By : Charith Silva

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Checking the Page Life Expectancy (PLE) counter in SQL Server is one of the greatest ways to identify memory consumption issues. Page Life Expectancy is the number of seconds a page will stay in the buffer pool without references. If PLE value is too low its indicates that data pages are being flushed from the buffer pool too quickly. The longer a page can stay in the buffer pool and be read from memory the better. We all know that having to constantly go back to disk to fetch data is costly. The minimum recommended value of the PLE counter is 300 seconds (5 minutes).

Here is the query that will return Page Life Expectancy in seconds, minutes and hours.

SELECT [object_name]
,[counter_name]
,[cntr_value] AS Seconds
,[cntr_value]/ 60 AS Minutes 
,[cntr_value]/ 3600 AS Hours
FROM sys.dm_os_performance_counters
WHERE [object_name] LIKE '%Manager%'
AND[counter_name] = 'Page life expectancy'

SELECT [object_name]

,[counter_name]

,[cntr_value] AS Seconds

,[cntr_value]/ 60 AS Minutes

,[cntr_value]/ 3600 AS Hours

FROM sys.dm_os_performance_counters

WHERE [object_name] LIKE '%Manager%'

AND[counter_name] = 'Page life expectancy'

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About The Author

Charith Silva

Charith Silva is a Microsoft certified SQL Server developer and database administrator who was graduated at Buckinghamshire New university in the UK. His career was started in 1998, primarily into Web application development, and later diversified into database development. He has got a vast experience in SQL Server database development, Database administration and Business Intelligence development. He believes that sharing the knowledge is key to the success.

Number of Posts : 87

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