8.1 System resource use

Establish trends. Use the System Monitor to monitor resources into a log file over a period of time. Get to know the normal ranges of the key counters.

When using the System Monitor interactively, run the graphical user interface on a machine other than the server being monitored to minimize the System Monitor impact.

Do not jump to conclusions. The performance problem may be caused by something you do not expect. It's easy to become convinced that something is causing a problem and to subconsciously twist the evidence to fit your theory.

Remember that system resource bottlenecks may be a symptom of something else. A classic is a disk I/O bottleneck caused by paging due to a memory shortage.

Ensure that you have sufficient page file space.

Remove services and protocols you are not using from the server. Do not run a screen saver on the server.

Try to run SQL Server on a dedicated server with no other applications running. It is much easier to optimize SQL Server in this situation. Try to avoid installing SQL Server on a Domain Controller (PDC).

Place tempdb on a fast device. Use the System Monitor or Alert subsystem to track it if it expands dynamically. By default it will be reset to its initial size on SQL Server restart. It may be beneficial to manually expand it to the...