Most of the time when I run a poll on my blog, I run it for at least a month so that I can get enough results in order for the data to be more or less representative of the SQL Server community. What has been odd about this poll, is that even though I have run it longer than any other poll on the website, it has had one of the fewest response rates.

When I look at the results, my best guess is that people who have looked at the poll weren’t familiar with the question, and because of that, ignored responding to it, instead of admitting that they didn’t know what it was. Or, perhaps it is because this feature is only available in SQL Server 2008 and higher, and not everyone is running this version yet.

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Lock Pages in Memory is a setting that can be set on 64-bit operating systems that essentially tell Windows not to swap out SQL Server memory to disk. By default, this setting is turned off on 64-bit systems, and depending on the circumstances, the following conditions could occur when this setting is not turned on:

1) Performance of SQL Server could suddenly decreases for no apparent reason.

2) The hardware running SQL Server could suddenly appear to stop responding for a short period of time.

3) Applications connected to SQL Server could time out.

4) Among many others.

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