Too many context switches per second are considered bad for your database performance. But how many is too many has never been clear. With the core count of new servers going up rapidly, it becomes even less clear how we should evaluate this counter to help understand the SQL Server behavior in the environments we support. Recognizing that any ...

This is in part a response to a comment by Paul White (@SQL_Kiwi) to my previous post on the performance impact of enabling hyperthreading (HT) on OLTP queries, and in part due to my desire to capture a more complete set of test data for future investigation on this very topic. I’m posting below the results of re-running the same exact test as ...

My previous post focuses on the performance impact of enabling hyperthreading (HT) on a machine with four Intel Westmere-EX processors on reporting queries. Let’s turn our attention to OLTP queries. To oversimplify it, reporting queries are generally processed by scanning a large number of pages, whereas quick index seeks are the hallmark of OLTP ...

One of the key performance metrics on any computer system is its memory speed (or memory bandwidth).   Memory speed can be measured in many different ways at different levels. At the OS level, one way to measure memory speed is to clock how fast (in terms of megabytes/gigabytes per second) it can read a piece of data from a memory location ...

[2008/08/25] This post has been modified significantly to correct some inaccurate statements because I mis-read Joe Chang's post. Joe Chang posted some interesting results using the TPC-H queries with the scale factor set to 10. I happened to have done something similar, and naturally noticed a rather significant difference between his results ...