Posted by Ed Murphy on 12/08/06 03:06

mike wrote:

> I know i must work on queries and other things

Do you know that it should be your first priority? Non-optimized
queries often make a big difference.

> was just wondering what a good configuration is
> at the server level.....

Second priority is RAM. More RAM = more cached data = less frequent
disk access. (Disk access is a lot slower than RAM access.) Using
more than 4 GB requires a bit of non-trivial configuration.

Third priority is disk speed. Ideally, you want to keep data, logs,
temp database, and operating system on separate physical drives, or
at least separate logical ones. (Parallelism, scan patterns, and
fragmentation.) Higher RPM = faster disk access.

CPU should be adequate, but a typical SQL server is doing simple
operations on large volumes of data, thus bottlenecks somewhere else
(RAM cache, disk speed, network bandwidth) before it gets anywhere
close to bottlenecking on CPU. A bottleneck on CPU may indicate a
complex query in need of simplification (e.g. inefficient joins,
cursors that could be replaced with joins, sorting that could be
more effectively delegated to the client).

Network should be stable, and bandwidth should be adequate, but a
bottleneck on bandwidth may indicate a need for more filtering on the
data prior to transmitting it to the client.

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