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What Is Page Life Expectancy (PLE) and What Does It Indicate?

Senior MS SQL
Quick Answer PLE measures how long (in seconds) a data page stays in the buffer pool before being pushed out by new pages. A healthy PLE is typically 300+ seconds (5 minutes). Dropping PLE means SQL Server is constantly evicting and re-reading pages — a sign of memory pressure or queries doing large scans.

Answer

Page Life Expectancy (PLE) measures how long pages remain in the buffer pool before eviction.

High PLE = good memory health.
Low PLE = memory pressure, excessive physical reads.

Common causes of low PLE: bad queries, missing indexes, large scans, spills.

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