MSSQL server is using 851mb of memory?!

Recently here at work we have been having a lot of our web applications time out after a couple minutes. Really doing just basic things like counting the number of records in the database, etc.

I went on to the machine itself (win2k) and looked at what MSSQL server was doing in the process list... and it was taking up a mind boggling 851 megabytes of memory. Out of a gig of RAM on that machine there was only 13mb available.

We restarted it last night and when I checked it today it has already grown back up to 460mb.

Is this normal?? I've never heard of applications taking up this much ram... especially since its not like anyone, or anything, is pulling down 850mb every second from the database.

Is there some kind of known memory leak in MSSQL server (8.00.760 SP3)? Or is there some other reason our web apps are now timing out, when previously they never did ...

Looking around, i decided to check exactly how much data is being stored in the database, on disk.

We have three main databases:

db1: 28mb on disk
db2: 250mb on disk
db3: 1,200mb on disk



Now that last DB3 is so huge because we have a table in there that is acting as a hit counter that logs every single http access to one of the websites. That one 'hits' table has 813,000 rows in it.

So granted, there is a lot of data in there... however, at no time are any of the webapplications EVER trying to pull all 813,000 rows off the SQL server at once. There still is no reason for SQL server itself to be using 850mb of memory.

Besides, I run a linux server for my own personal company, with MySQL on it, doing the exact same thing (logging hits to the website) and that table got just as big as the one here at work, and MySQL never took up 850mb of ram, nor has it ever timed out trying to do a query, even when I DID do queries like "select * from hits", basically grabbing down a ton of data at a time.