>>- if SQL Server is not used very often, but when it is used, it is used hard, and grabs a lot of RAM
>>- in that case, SQL Server is not very good at reducing its RAM usage when its load goes down, so other processes may be RAM-starved
>
>I just restarted mine (2005 Express) and the total usage dropped from 1.5G to 1.2. The sqlservr.exe's usage is now about 0.7M. The funny thing is that it shows peak usage of 25M - so, why did the usage drop by 300M then? My guess is that M$ chose to show a confusing set of numbers in the task manager. Some of them are physical memory only, some include pagefile usage, some are page faults (by count, not by size, I guess) etc etc. So instead of just four numbers (current/max RAM, current/max pagefile), we have grannies and frogs to compare.

Yeah, even the 1GB Memory limit is squishy: "One GB memory limit for the buffer pool" ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345154.aspx ), whatever that's supposed to mean.