Question

I have a server with 32 gigs of RAM and Intel Xeon CPU (2 processors at 2.4GHz).

SQL Server 2008 is running on it with 3 or 4 databases.

The problem is that the CPU and memory has been running at full capacity and I initially thought it was multithreaded applications I was running through Visual Studio, but after shutting these down, nothing has changed. Someone suggested I do performance testing in SQL but I am not sure if this will give the answers I need.

I looked at the activity monitor and I can see which are expensive queries etc. but my question is whether these are sufficient. I need to present to my lead stats on what is causing the spike in CPU and memory and is the activity monitor results enough or do I need to use the SQL Server Profiler and run traces. Any suggestions appreciated.

Answer 1

I use the following Query to find out the most expensive queries on my server – originally from here.

Hopefully it helps!

SELECT DISTINCT TOP 10 t.TEXT QueryName,
                       s.execution_count AS ExecutionCount,
                       s.max_elapsed_time AS MaxElapsedTime,
                       Isnull(s.total_elapsed_time / s.execution_count, 0) AS AvgElapsedTime,
                       s.creation_time AS LogCreatedOn,
                       Isnull(s.execution_count / Datediff(s, s.creation_time, Getdate()), 0) AS FrequencyPerSec
FROM   sys.dm_exec_query_stats s
       CROSS APPLY sys.Dm_exec_sql_text(s.sql_handle) t
ORDER  BY s.max_elapsed_time DESC