Powershell Get-Process negative memory value

Question

I was making some verifications with Powershell Get-Process cmdlet and got some weird values about some processes. I tested on a server with a SQL Server Instance running and consuming 3GB+ RAM as Resource Monitor reported, and when running Get-Process, I got negative values for WorkingSet on the SQL server process, another process is consuming 2GB+ of PrivateMemorySize and got the same negative value on PM.

Below are screenshots of the results.

The OS is in portuguese, sorry.

Powershell:

Check sqlservr and the last scvhost...

Luckily my script uses WMI (Win32_Process class) to get the processes informations, and the values there are correct and everything matches..

Is it a bug? Maybe with big values? I'm using Powershell v3.

Answer 1

Is this an x64 Server? If so, it's possible this blogpost explains your issue. Apparently it has to do with the way the get-process reads x64 systems memory:

The reason the poster was seeing negative numbers is fairly simple: the WS property is aliased to WorkingSet, but WorkingSet is a 32-bit value. In the poster’s case, the working set size overflowed the 32-bit value, resulting in a negative number being displayed.

The solution according to the blog is ultimately to enforce formatting of the query result:

$process = “*SQL"*” GPS $process | ft name, workingset64 –auto

Answer 2

Selecting WorkingSet64 instead of WorkingSet did the trick for me without formatting.