You finally got approval to move to new hardware and a fresher version of SQL Server. After months of work, you do the migration and then… performance gets worse. What can cause this, and what do you look for?
Never, ever, disable backups to fix a performance problem.
If you’re not having a performance crisis, you might look at that sentence and say, “Wow, that’s super dumb! Who would ever do that?”
Well, a lot of people, actually. It’s pretty common.
I am a fangirl of Adam Machanic’s free sp_whoisactive stored procedure.
One of the great things about sp_whoisactive is that it’s very quick to generate a table to collect the data you need, then run the procedure in a loop with a wait statement to regularly collect the data you want over an interval.
When setting up data collection using the GUI, configuration failed halfway through setup. At the point of failure I found there were SQL Agent jobs for collections visible, but nothing appearing in Management Studio under Management\Data Collection. The Data Collection icon still had the ‘off’ down red arrow. (I manually refreshed it for good measure to make sure.)
Sometimes tempdb is filling up. Sometimes I just want to monitor the amount of tempdb and check out execution plans of heavy tempdb users while watching performance on a server.
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