Hello Anon,
Yes, "total physical memory" is the memory used by your ASE, at the given point of time, for functioning. It could only grow, since ASE do not shrink memory dynamically. For decreasing the total physical memory, you need to change the config parameters accordingly and bounce your ASE.
Yes, if when your "total physical memory", becomes equal to your Max Memory. ( Not sure if such a scenario occurs) the complete memory given to ASE, is allocated.
Ideally the formula is
Max Memory >= Total Logical Memory >= Total Physical memory
When you do a sp_configure 'memory'
the last line should read as follows:
An additional ............. K bytes of memory is available for reconfiguration. This is the difference between 'max memory' and 'total logical memory'.
Which means, you would have so-and-so amount of KBytes available in the memory left to be configured.
Regards,
Ajith Prabhakaran