June 2, 2004 at 1:58 am
Howdy!
I am developing a system which will be running a database on a server machine. My local machine is a single cpu pentium 4 3GHz with windows XP. I can get a reasonable amount of performance hitting my machine as the sql server.
I set up sql server with all the service packs on a dual xeon 2.4GHz running Windows 2003 Enterprise. To my dismay, I only get HALF the performance compared to that of my local machine. I would expect to see an increase in speed even though it has slower CPUs. I am running the application on the same machine as SqlServer each time so I know it isn't a networking issue.
I was wondering if there is a performance issue with
a) Windows 2003 with Sql Server 2000
b) Sql Server 2003 with dual xeon processors
c) The dual xeon processors compared to a single 3Ghz pc.
Any input would be helpful!
James Chang
June 2, 2004 at 11:32 pm
Hi James,
I can't really offer you an explanation as to why SQL Server is running slower, but I can tell you that I have experienced the exact same problem on 4 xeon hyperthreading processors with 8 GB RAM.
I also experieced the slow down occuring the longer the machine was up. A reboot first thing in the morning and it would run fine, but gradually slowed down as the day went on.
Profiler or Performance Monitor didn't offer any explanation as to what was happening.
In the end I gave up and we stuck with Windows 2000 for our app, but soon we will have to look at 2003 for our customers.
If you find a reason for the bad perfomance please post your findings.
Cheers,
Angela
June 3, 2004 at 1:40 am
There is a reason for this - and appologies if I misquote someone here - but my answer is based on an overheard conversation which went something like this...
In win2000 there was a bug, which allowed transaction log data to return a 'transaction committed' while the data was still cached, and had not yet been written to the disk.
Windows2003 has fixed this problem, in that it now waits for data to be written to the disk before saying 'transaction committed' - hence the apparent drop in performance - particlarly in transcation with large numbers of writes.
June 3, 2004 at 2:13 am
Thanks for reply.
I think I have narrowed down the problem to be something to do with the multiprocessor setup. I had a look at the execution plan for the queries and store procedures used in the application on the server machine. None of them were using any kind of parallelism. As such, only the single slower cpu was being used and hence the slower results.
Now the problem is to find out how to make better use of the multiprocessor environment..
June 3, 2004 at 5:50 am
Hi James,
In the past I've experienced a very serious performance issue with SQL Server 2000, WIn 2000 Server (dual proc PIII 900) and SMP. Disabling the multi-processor support in EM, applications were faster by a TEN factor! In fact there was an intensive use of UDF, responsible of a lot of reading.
Recently with SS2k and Win 2003 on a Blade Server IBM dual Xeon + SAN, we had a case of very poor performances (Queues for disk access were too long) , solved applying an Hot Fix for Win 2003.
ciao
Marco Buttazzoni
June 6, 2004 at 5:40 pm
Marco,
could you point me in the direction of that Hot Fix that you installed? Thanks.
James.
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