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Proposed AnswerDatabase Utilization Vs Network Utilization

  • Tuesday, October 20, 2009 5:41 PMMayur Kashikar Users MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers Medals
     
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    Hi Friends

    I have been facing problem related to either Database Utilization or Network Utilization.

    The Application Software at our end keeps freezing or becomes very slow at the peak business hours.
    Although we identified a few queries that take time and we have been successful in optimizing them too. Now what's itching my head is, that whenever the application is slow the Network Utilization also goes up along with the Database Utilization.

    Looking at this trend I have started thinking that may be my Database is not a culprit but there can be some Network issue due to which the application slows down as soon as the number of users increase. (we are using 1Gbps network).

    How can I check if the issue is with the Database or the Network???

    I want to monitor these two consistently and prove who is a culprit.

    I am using SQL Server 2005.

    Kindly help.

    Thanks
    Mayur Kashikar
     

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  • Tuesday, October 20, 2009 7:45 PMPaul E LongMSFT, OwnerUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers MedalsUsers Medals
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    Perhaps the easiest thing you can do from a network perspective is to take a trace during this peak time, and use the Top User expert to see if there's any one user that is monopolizing bandwidth.  Top Users is available on www.codeplex.com/nmexperts.

    When you take the trace, be aware that on a 1gig network, the load on the capturing machine could be a problem given a large amount of network traffic.  I would recommend using NMCap with not filter and monitoring the command line to make sure the pending count doens't continue to grow over  a 15 minute period.  If load on the server is a concern, you might opt to capture on a mirror port on your switch instead.  In that case remember to turn on promiscuous mode to capture all the servers traffic.  Also, depending on the traffic you might opt for a chained capture or a circular capture.  In either case I would use a large buffer size, 200M-500M.

    Once you determine if there are clients monoplizing the connects, you could dive further into the trace to see what they are doing.  If this is SQL traffic, you could filter on "TDS" to see just that traffic.  Then find the clients in the conversation tree to narrow down what each is doing.

    Paul