Performance Monitor causing Transaction Logs to increase exponentially

  • We ran Performance Monitor to determine a performance baseline,

    and it caused the transaction logs to increase from a couple MBs to 40+ GBs

    The counters we used were:

    Processor Object:

    -% Processor Time

    System Object:

    -Processor Queue Length

    Memory Object:

    -Pages/sec

    -Available MBytes

    PhysicalDisk Object:

    -Avg. Disk Queue Length

    -% Idle Time

    SQL Server Buffer Manager Object

    -Buffer Cache Hit Ratio

    SQL Server Locks Object

    -Average Wait Time

    Would any one of these cause the transaction logs to increase exponentially?

    This is on a server running Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 with latest Service Pack

    EDIT: We ran the Performance Monitor from 12:00PM to 4:30PM,

    it saved as one .csv (Text with Comma Delimited).

    Any help would be greatly appreciated

    Mike

    --Mike

  • Sorry Mike,

    but running performance monitor has no effect on you're database size or the transaction log unless you write the results directly to a database. Since you used a csv file, there must be some other proces inside SQL server which is causing that growth.

    [font="Verdana"]Markus Bohse[/font]

  • Looks like it was the Performance Monitor.

    When we removed

    SQL Server Buffer Manager Object

    -Buffer Cache Hit Ratio

    SQL Server Locks Object

    -Average Wait Time

    from the counter list, the problem seems to be solved.

    The Transaction Logs went back down to their usual size and have maintained their size for a day.

    --Mike

  • Mike,

    I have to agree with Markus on this one. Performance Monitor does not do any writing to the database so it won't affect log size. I think removing those counters and seeing the Log stay the same size was coincidence. I would think you had something else happening on the server when you first ran performance monitor that caused the log to grow. I'd investigate that by looking at job schedules and history. Maybe a backup log job failed so your transaction log had to grow instead of wrap.

  • The transaction log will not auto shrink. It sounds like you have a maintenance job or plan tha that is running overnight. I would investigate that as a source of your log file size changing.

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