8.1 System Resource Usage

Establish trends. Use the Performance 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 Performance Monitor interactively run the GUI on a machine other than the server being monitored to minimize the Performance 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 that isn't and to subconsciously twist the evidence to fit your theory.

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

Do not forget that SQL Server does not automatically take advantage of the fact that you have added more physical memory. You will need to adjust the memory server configuration option.

Ensure that you have sufficient page file space.

Remember that, unless you have adjusted the SMP concurrency server con-figuration option, SQL Server will only release threads to one of your processors in a dual processor server.

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

Try and run SQL Server on a dedicated server with no other applications running. It is much easier...