SQL Server Performance Forum – Threads Archive

Hardware Tuning

I have dual Processor server. In SQL there is option to select select the processors and Ram, so we can make SQL to use one or both processor and limited Ram.
I want to know if I make SQL server use only one processor and limited RAM and another CPU for Windows USE, it will better performance or …? thanks
[8D] M. Murali, IT Supervisor
Meeru Island Resort

---

Based on my experiments with our servers (we have dual processors too), assuming the sql server is dedicated with no other s/w or components running on it, I think it tends to perform better given both CPU’s. Windows does a pretty good job at distributing the workload between the CPU’s, and the amount of CPU time required by windows doing its job, when compared to that used by SQL, under heavy load, is not that much.

---

I agree with Chappy, most of the time it is better to let Windows 2000 and SQL Server work together as a team, allowing them to manage use of memory and the CPU, especially if the server is a dedicated SQL Server. If you only allow SQL Server to use one of the CPUs, then it won’t be able to use parallelism in its queries, which could hurt performance (at least two CPUs are needed for parallelism). Also, Windows 2000, but itself, doesn’t use that much CPU anyway, when compared to SQL Server. I recommend you leave the defaults for CPU and memory.
——————
Brad M. McGehee
Webmaster
SQL-Server-Performance.Com

---

]]>