June 15, 2009 at 9:15 am
Afternoon all,
We have a Windows Server 2003R2 (Service Pack 2) that is a dedicated SQL2005 Server (standard edition)
The server has 2.50GHz, 16GB of RAM and is a Service pack 2 box.
My question is: What are the effects of High CPU on the box over a long period of time? (i.e. weeks, months & year)
I've noticed that an application one of the Devs has written puts the CPU at over 50% (more often than not higher than the recommended 65% from some SQL2005 reading material I have) constantly throughout the day. Essentially its performing a huge number of updates and inserts. I was monitoring the server earlier today with perfmon and when I asked him to turn it off to test, the CPU dropped immediately which confirmed my suspicion.
Fortunately, its running on a test DB and is not affecting anything else but if this gets rolled out I want to know what the effects (hardware really) of having a CPU working that hard consistently.
Thanks in advance,
Dan
June 15, 2009 at 10:57 am
There's no effect I'm aware of. The CPU is silicon, I guess it could run hot and degrade, but it has no moving parts, so I don't think there's an issue with the hardware. It does mean perhaps that the box is undersized or the code isn't well written.
June 15, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Look for missing indexes causing lots of table scans or clustered index scans in the execution plans. That is one of the most common drivers for high CPU. Your problem is going to be that this design won't scale if the load increases, so you should isolate why you have CPU pressure like this currently and fix that problem. High CPU utilization is just a drag for performance, it doesn't degrade the processors life time.
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