Microsoft® SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed

Monitoring the Processors

The main processors of a server do the majority of the hard work, executing the operating system code and all applications. This is the next logical place to start looking at the performance of a system. With SQL Server 2008, you can identify the number of CPUs you want to utilize on your physical machine. If your physical machine has 32 CPUs, you might not necessarily want to make all 32 CPUs available to SQL Server. In fact, in some cases, this would be a detriment; some CPU processing should be reserved for the OS and the network management on heavily loaded servers (5% of the CPUs). SQL Server allows you to identify how many CPUs it can use from what is available on the physical machine. In Figure 39.27, you can ...