I work with SQL Server 2005 and wonder, if not CPU, disk or network, what are users waiting for when SQL Server is working. The strange thing is that system monitor shows that the 4 processors are at an average of 5%, the disk (demonstrated 50MB/s write) works with about 5-8 MB/s, but the execution (inserts and selects) take up to 10 minutes. I’d be happy to install additional hardware, but I don’t see what device is the bottleneck and how do I measure its capacity and current workload.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks
additional info: RAM is constantly at about 70% capacity and I am running windows xp.
check your disk read and write ‘wait’ time. a heavy load database may just make a lot of read and write request with very small piece of data that saturates the IO.