Hello, I am the network administrator and my DB admin has given me a list of performance counters that he is concerned about. The counter that is most in question is the systemcontext switches. He/we think the this counter is quite high and I was wondering a few things about it: If all other performance counters do not indicate a bottleneck should this be of concern? Is it better to watch for a major increase or shoot for a target range? What is the best way to determine if this counter is high for our system? If it is high for our system what is gnerally the best way to lower it? The server specs: Windows 2003 sp2 SQL 2005 sp2 2 dual core 3.4mhz processor 8 gigs ram
FYI, from one of the technet:SystemContext Switches/sec Threshold: As a general rule, context switching rates of less than 5,000 per second per processor are not worth worrying about. If context switching rates exceed 15,000 per second per processor, then there is a constraint. Significance: Context switching happens when a higher priority thread preempts a lower priority thread that is currently running or when a high priority thread blocks. High levels of context switching can occur when many threads share the same priority level. This often indicates that there are too many threads competing for the processors on the system. If you do not see much processor utilization and you see very low levels of context switching, it could indicate that threads are blocked.
Check the following... http://blogs.technet.com/vipulshah/...leshooting-sql-server-performance-issues.aspx http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/hroggero/managingmaxdegreeofparallelism.asp
