Performance collapse on writing to database

Hello!
We have an application that stores online measurement data in a MSDE
database.
Some statistics: 20 x 1kb per minute.
We had no problems for several months at many locations.
On some of our systems we saw that the SQL Server took very much of the
memory and some of the customers complaint about this. So we limitted the
maximum server memory of SQL Server to half of the available RAM memory
(most of the machines had 1GB RAM).
After running the SQL Server then for a while we saw that the writing to the
database got slower and slower and in the end it took about 30 Seconds and
more for a single INSERT. After stopping and restarting the SQL Server
everything worked fine again.
The time for reading out of the database was never influenced.
Can anybody explain this to me?
Is there a way to avoid it?
I hope on many useful answers!
Thanks!
what is the sqlserver instance doing in 30 seconds? Is it waiting on IO? Or
blocked by something? select from sysprocesses as a start. There are some
good information on the web for analyzing blocking issues.
--
Wei Xiao [MSFT]
SQL Server Storage Engine Development
http://blogs.msdn.com/weix
"Frank Esser" <Mistral@.nurfuerspam.de> wrote in message
news:OGWumWSgFHA.2700@.TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl...
> Hello!
> We have an application that stores online measurement data in a MSDE
> database.
> Some statistics: 20 x 1kb per minute.
> We had no problems for several months at many locations.
> On some of our systems we saw that the SQL Server took very much of the
> memory and some of the customers complaint about this. So we limitted the
> maximum server memory of SQL Server to half of the available RAM memory
> (most of the machines had 1GB RAM).
> After running the SQL Server then for a while we saw that the writing to
the
> database got slower and slower and in the end it took about 30 Seconds and
> more for a single INSERT. After stopping and restarting the SQL Server
> everything worked fine again.
> The time for reading out of the database was never influenced.
> Can anybody explain this to me?
> Is there a way to avoid it?
> I hope on many useful answers!
> Thanks!
>