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I'm looking at PLE (Page Life Expectancy) across NUMA nodes on our SQL Servers, and came across a rather weird distribution. NUMA node 000 has a very low PLE compared to 001. I'm unsure why this is. I've checked on multiple other SQL Servers in our environment, and the other production servers do not have this behavior.

System is running SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition on Dell m620 with 256GB Ram. It's a 2 socket, 6 core (HT enabled) machine. MAXDOP is set at 6. AFAIK memory modules are installed evenly across the memory banks of the CPUs

Something tells me NUMA node 000 has other SQL tasks to perform, that other nodes, but i've forgotten where I heard/saw it.

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@@Version shows: Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (SP1) - 11.0.3412.0 (X64)

Paul White
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Kasper Brandenburg
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2 Answers2

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If you have a read-intensive query running on one NUMA node (in this case, 0), then it can experience a lower page life expectancy relative to other NUMA nodes.

That's totally normal.

To see what queries are running right now, you can use Adam Machanic's excellent sp_WhoIsActive. It's totally free. Some folks even run it every X minutes and log the data into a table so they can go back to see what was running at the time PLE nosedived.

Brent Ozar
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My understanding of NUMA architecture is that each node pretty much isolates itself. In that case they could end up doing very different work. For example, 0 could be executing queries requiring lots of physical I/O while 1 gets lucky and finds all its data in the buffer pool.

SQL Nerd
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