If Windows Installer version on your server is 4.5 then it could be antivirus. I had not exact, but similar issue.

There is another great article from Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918483

The Commit Charge as indicated by the Task Manager in Windows is the amount of virtual memory usage by the system.

I would pay attention to the Physical memory - Total...

It will not lock the table if you use ONLINE = ON index option. It will still affect performance. I try to create indexes on large tables after hours only.

We have noticed difference even without these counters, using Windows Task Manager only. Before "lock pages in memory" setting SQL Server process (sqlservr.exe) took almost all available memory (29Gb out...

Defenetely should be careful if your SQL Server edition is not Enterprise. Then ONLINE index option will not be available and table will be locked for the duration of the...

Here is an example of physical-record locator for an object (sys.fn_PhysLocFormatter undocumented function):

http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/post/SQL-Server-2008-New-(undocumented)-physical-row-locator-function.aspx

Try this:

SELECT * FROM articlesection s LEFT JOIN article a

ON s.path = a.path

WHERE a.path IS NULL

and then other way around:

SELECT * FROM article s LEFT JOIN articlesection a

ON s.path =...

Try to use Surface Area Configuration tool to start the SQL Server Agent service.

The best practice is to use Local Account (or Domain Account if SQL need access to other domain resources) that is not member of Local Administrators group. Microsoft doesn't recommend...

After "Agent XPs" has been enabled - start SQL Server Agent service.

You can query sys.extended_properties in combination with sp_msforeachdb stored procedure.

EXEC dbo.sp_msforeachdb 'SELECT ''?'' db_name, OBJECT_NAME(ex.major_id) object_name, ex.name ext_prop_name,

ex.value ext_prop_value

...

If you use Enterprise Edition of SQL Server you can try "online" option for rebuilding indexes.

The simple start will be to update statistics and reorganize indexes on the database. It helps me in most cases when I inherit databases from other environments.

If this doesn't help...

The first step will be defragment the index of the base table. More information could be found heer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms142560(v=SQL.90).aspx (look at the last part of the article).