Information: The buffer manager failed a memory allocation call for ‘’ bytes

Running SSIS, you might get the following:

Information: The buffer manager failed a memory allocation call for 10485288 bytes, but was unable to swap out any buffers to relieve memory pressure. 108 buffers were considered and 108 were locked. Either not enough memory is available to the pipeline because not enough are installed, other processes were using it, or too many buffers are locked.

There are a couple of old posts, here, and here, as well as another stab here; we ran into this last week when running an SSIS package that a developer built awhile back, and when we looked at it we immediately thought that he had too many transformations (source to destination) in his control flow task.

Without cracking BOL or digging into posts on the internals or dialing up some SQL engine MVP, we did the most logical thing and removed 1/2 of the transformations and it worked fine.  The error isn’t exactly an error – it’s informational, so the package continues to run. Logging into the server and looking at perfmon, it was easy to see that the process ate up too much memory (completely maxed out), so logically decreasing what the package did eliminated the memory pressure and cleaned up the informational message. Alternatively, we could have looked at buffer rows, calculating row size, etc. we were aware of the available memory on the server and knew immediately that the process was too much for the given setup.

Thanks,

Lee

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http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sqlintegrationservices/thread/45ae064b-10b1-401a-b9df-3187f9a6b5ca

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sqlintegrationservices/thread/d6d52157-0270-4200-a8c2-585fa9a0eed5/

http://sqlserver-qa.net/blogs/bi/archive/2010/02/01/the-buffer-manager-failed-a-memory-allocation-call-for-20485670-bytes-but-was-unable-to-swap-out-any-buffers-to-relieve-memory-pressure.aspx