WSUS 3.0 Is Still A Memory Hog

This evening I brought my WSUS server up to WSUS 3.0. Mostly I wanted to see if it still was as big a memory hog as 2.0. After the 90-minute-or-so installation was finished, here is what I had:

wsusservice: 50 MB
IIS worker process: 100 MB
SQL 2005 instance: 400 MB

That's over half a gig! For a single service! In SBS land it has been standard practice to throttle SQL Server down a bit as there are other things running on the servers, so I decided to try it.

There is just one snag: WSUS ships with the "Windows Internal Database", i.e. SQL Server 2005 extremely lite. There are only three binaries in it, including exactly zero management tools. There is nothing you can use to run the commands to throttle it.

Fortunately, I had an installation of SQL Server 2000 SP4 still on this server. That install came with OSQL.EXE, the command-line SQL query/adminstration tool. It works against SQL 2005 too. The following command seems to do the trick. It remains to be seen how well it works:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn>osql -E -S <server name>\MICROSOFT##SSEE
1> sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1;
2> reconfigure;
3> go
Configuration option 'show advanced options' changed from 0 to 1. Run the RECONFIGURE statement to install.
1> sp_configure 'max server memory', 256;
2> reconfigure;
3> go
Configuration option 'max server memory (MB)' changed from 2147483647 to 256. Run the RECONFIGURE statement to install.
1> exit

If you want to return the server to the default run the same command, but specify 2147483647 for the "max server memory" instead of 256. If you want a different maximum memory size than 256 change it. The value is specified in megabytes.