I would follow Allen_Cui's advise and look at PerfMon first to determine if you have an I/O bottleneck or contention within the database for I/O resources...

latching can come from a variety of things. If you have an I/O bottleneck you could see some page latching. If you have high contention for the same...

perhaps instead of creating one table per web site owner you could create one table per month and let all the owners search the same table.

Views might help...

You need to create a transaction, around the two statements, with the correct isolation level for your business case. See the SQL Books Online "Isolation Levels"

I don't know of a way to monitor CPU busy from SQL but there is a way to check the state of SQL's processing capacity.

DBCC SQLPERF (UMSSTATS) will provide some...

I've found this counter to be very unreliable myself. I would look at Packets/sec and Bytes/sec and see if those values are out of range for the particular NIC...

You problem is an interesting one.

How did you verify uncommitted transactions and lack of RAM? What were the values?

Besides using temp tables what else are the SPs doing? ...

I would go with a mid-range disk subsystem that will allow you to get as many disk drives as possible. Physical disk drives dictate performance not the size of...

Database Hammer is a VB app that will run on NT or W2K

I think Simon is correct.

I would turn on the Performance Monitor in NT and look at Processor Utilization, Average Disk Queue length and sec/Transfer. In SQL I would look...

I'm not sure about Views using TempDB to store data, but I know tables created with the # or ##, Order by operations, large Hash joins and some cursors use...

I believe the LockTimeout setting is connection based. Could there be connections that set it to something else? The default is -1 so it would have to be...

robhaas is running SQL 7 so /3GB or upgrading SQL are the only options for more memory.

You'll need SQL 2000 to run 6 or 8 GB.

Besides having enough RAM, which I think you have enough info to investigate about (what out for paging if you modify min/max mem settings), I would also monitor disk utliziation....

What type of statement(s) is the SP doing?