August 4, 2005 at 1:44 pm
I have what is likely a pretty obscure question. By any chance, do any of you know if the act of starting a trace could have any system impact? Does it cause an abnormal memory hit, locking, or the like?
Here's the background to the question. There's a nightly batch using MQSeries that we're trying to optimize. So I scheduled a trace for 8:45 to 9:30 (as I did previous Saturdays). Around that time, the MQ process (which I know very little about) starts having problems and begins backing up. The backup shouldn't happen, and the bug is being fixed in the next build, but something caused the MQ process to go sour. Our business/technical analyst believes the trace is to blame. He says that it must have done something to block or interfere with the MQ process, causing it to start timing out and then snowballing from there. He says it was probably coincidental This has happened once before but not on another occassion. I can't say that I agree, as I know of nothing with traces which could cause any locks or blocks.
FYI, I used a scheduled job to call the trace stored procedure at 8:45. The strace stored proc is based off a trace scripted from Profiler, along with some minor extra stuff I added (such as first validating the filename using xp_fileexist).
Anybody have any idea what could have happened? The only thing I can think of is that the start of the trace might have seriously spiked the memory or CPU, it might have locked the tempdb when creating the temp table for the xp_fileexist, or he might be incorrect. I'm inclined toward that latter. I find it more likely that another scheduled job may have been the culprit. Thanks!
August 8, 2005 at 8:00 am
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August 9, 2005 at 11:18 am
Starting up traces does indeed affect performance but whether or not it is enough to impact other jobs is uncertain. If you were running a trace, what did the trace data show?
Are you running any diagnostic tools?
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