Can windows 2003 server support more than 4gb ram

Windows Server R2 is available only in bit editions. If the memory is remapped, X64 Windows can use this memory. Any X64 Windows or X86 Server release can. The limit that these versions impose is the highest permitted physical RAM address, not the size of the IO space.

For example, drivers could map the "lost" memory regions located above 4 GB and expose this memory as a RAM disk. Physical Address Extension. Skip to main content. Viewed 17k times. Thanks Duncan. Improve this question. Duncan Duncan 2 2 gold badges 6 6 silver badges 11 11 bronze badges. Add a comment.

Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. Walter Walter 1, 7 7 silver badges 13 13 bronze badges. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. I have always wondered about this and never totally understood how 32 bit machines are addressing more than 4 GB of RAM.

I mean, there are no more address lines left, correct? Is it achieved similar to EMS memory of the 20 address line , using a window of rotating memory? It uses paging tables to map the memory greater than 4 GB. By doing this the physical address size is increased to 36 bits, or 64 GB. It's called PAE. Also, PAE tends to make the machine run slightly slower, because page table lookups have an extra level to go through. Each application can only use 2 or 3 GB of memory space but as the OS now has more memory to spread stuff out over - there will be less sharing between processes and hence some possible performance benefits.

The real magic however begins when using the AWE API with which you can actually use more memory with a single 32bit application that is especially written for this.

This is what SQL Server is doing. Well, your server operating system might be bit. SQL maybe only using 4 gigs of the 8, or some bit programs spawn more processes like video encoding software, in my experience to take advantage of the ram.

An application on a 32 bit OS can access of 4GB of address space. But this is virtual address space and has absolutely nothing to with the size of physical RAM. Blocks of 4K bytes are mapped to a process's address space as needed. It is not a hack as often claimed but is quite efficient. A client of mine recently had the following issue. You see memory below 4GB due to a limitation in the bit operating systems. It is not specific to any brand HP, Dell, etc. The boot. Try These Solutions.

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