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Performance Audit Checklist How to Interpret Key Performance Monitor Counters
Below is a discussions of the various key Performance Monitor counters, their recommended values, and some options for helping to identify and resolve the hardware bottlenecks. Note that I have limited the number of Performance Monitor counters to watch. I have done so because our goal in this article is to find the easy and obvious performance problems. Many other Performance Monitor counters can be found discussed elsewhere on this website. Memory: Pages/sec This counter measures the number of pages per second that are paged out of RAM to disk, or paged into RAM from disk. The more paging that occurs, the more I/O overhead your server experiences, which in turn can decrease the performance of SQL Server. Your goal is to try to keep paging to a minimum, not to eliminate it. Assuming that SQL Server is the only major application running on your server, then this figure should ideally average between zero and 20. You will most likely see spikes much greater than 20, which is normal. They key here is keeping the average pages per second less than 20. If your server is averaging more than 20 pages per second, one of the more likely causes of this is a memory bottleneck due to a lack of needed RAM. Generally speaking, the more RAM a server has, the less paging it has to perform. In most cases, on a physical server dedicated to SQL Server with an adequate amount of RAM, paging will average less than 20. An adequate amount of RAM for SQL Server is a server that has a Buffer Hit Cache Ratio (described in more detail later) of 99% and higher. If you have a SQL Server that has a Buffer Hit Cache Ratio of 99% or higher for a period of 24 hours, but you are getting an average paging level of over 20 during this same time period, this may indicate that you are running other applications on the physical server other than SQL Server. If this is the case, you should ideally remove those applications, allowing SQL Server to be the only major application on the physical server. If your SQL Server is not running any other applications, and paging exceeds 20 on average for a 24 hour period, this may mean that you have changed the SQL Server memory settings. SQL Server should be configured so that it is set to the “Dynamically configure SQL Server memory” option, and the “Maximum Memory” setting should be set to the highest level. For optimum performance, SQL Server should be allowed to take as much RAM as it wants for its own use without having to compete for RAM with other applications. Memory: Available Bytes Another way to check to see if your SQL Server has enough physical RAM is to check the Memory Object: Available Bytes counter. This value should be greater than 5MB. If not, then your SQL Server needs more physical RAM. On a server dedicated to SQL Server, SQL Server attempts to maintain from 4-10MB of free physical memory. The remaining physical RAM is used by the operating system and SQL Server. When the amount of available bytes is near 5MB, or lower, most likely SQL Server is experiencing a performance hit due to lack of memory. When this happens, you either need to increase the amount of physical RAM in the server, reduce the load on the server, or change your SQL Server’s memory configuration settings appropriately. Physical Disk: % Disk Time This counter measures how busy a physical array is (not a logical partition or individual disks in an array). It provides a good relative measure of how busy your arrays are. Before using this counter under NT 4.0, be sure to manually turn it on by going to the NT Command Prompt and entering the following: “diskperf -y”, and then rebooting your server. This is required to turn on the disk counters on for the first time under Windows NT 4.0. If you are running Windows 2000, this counter is turned on by default.
Counter Name
Average
Minimum
Maximum
Memory: Pages/sec
Memory: Available Bytes
Physical Disk: % Disk time
Physical Disk: Avg. Disk Queue Length
Processor: % Processor Time
System: Processor Queue Length
SQL Server Buffer: Buffer Cache Hit Ratio
SQL Server General: User Connections
Enter your results in the table above.
Use Performance Monitor to Help Identify SQL Server Hardware Bottlenecks
The best place to start your SQL Server performance audit is to begin with the Performance Monitor (System Monitor). By monitoring a few key counters over a 24 hour period, you should get a pretty good feel for any major hardware bottlenecks your SQL Server is experiencing.
Ideally, you should use Performance Monitor to create a log of key counters for a period of 24 hours. You will want to select a “typical” 24 hour period when it comes to deciding when to create your Performance Monitor log. For example, pick a typical business day, not a weekend or holiday.
Once you have captured 24 hours of Performance Monitor data in a log, display the recommended counters in the Graph mode of Performance Monitor, and then record the average, minimum, and maximum values in the table above. Once you have done this, then compare your results with the analysis below. By comparing your results with the recommendations below, you should be able to quickly identify any potential hardware bottlenecks your SQL Server is experiencing.
As a rule of thumb, the % Disk Time counter should run less than 55%. If this counter exceeds 55% for continuous periods (over 10 minutes or so during your 24 hour monitoring period), then your SQL Server may be experiencing an I/O bottleneck. If you see this behavior only occasionally in your 24 hour monitoring period, I wouldn’t worry too much, but if it happens often (say, several times an hour), then I would start looking into finding ways to increase the I/O performance on the server, or to reduce the load on the server. Some ways to boost disk I/O include adding drives to an array (if you can), getting faster drives, adding cache memory to the controller card (if you can), using a different version of RAID, or getting a faster controller.