http://blogs.msdn.com/b/boduff/archive/2008/03/31/how-to-set-max-server-memory.aspx

While I would generally use the maximum setting in those situations, I can see where the minimum setting could be useful. I was mainly curious if people have actually used them in that manner successfully. I didn’t mean to imply that the trimming issue was anything but a Windows issue. My expectation at the time of our testing the trimming issue was that the SQLOS would communicate to the OS that it should not take any memory below the minimum setting so I was surprised when it did.

Colleen -As an example Fulltext indexing prior to SQL Server 2008 runs as a separate process and can cause you to need a lot more than 4GB for the OS.

Colleen,

In some cases 4GB won’t be enough for everything ‘extra’ running on a typical server. The OS itself should have 2GB reserved. After that, consider you have things like AntiVirus software running. and newer x64 servers have a memory requirement perthread on the order of 2MB. So, if you have a server with 16 logical CPU, that could be 480 threads which is 960MB, almost a full GB right there. Oh, and if you are also running SSIS, or SSAS, well those have memory needs, too.

Now, here’s the thing, you *may* be memory starved…but you don’t know if you are unless you are measuring for it! So you could configure your box as I have outlined and never see any problem, or you could see memory pressure down the road and find out that leaving 6GB is better for your server.

The outline I have given is for a new box, one that I have just installed SQL onto, and I don’t have any particular memory requirements handed to me. I need to start somewhere, and the guidelines here just serve as a starting point, nothing more.