SQL2008 – Results from Activity Monitor

pdj

I have only one SQL customer using SQL2008, so I tried the new Activity Monitor which shows several interesting figures about the server. I especially noted the Resource Waits area, which lists statistics from 10 different wait categories. I’m currently optimizing a heavily customized NAV solution where a few central records are locked in almost every transaction. Users are therefore often waiting a few seconds before their transaction are completed due to other users having locked the record. I therefore expected to find the Activity Monitor would show Lock as the category with the highest “Cumulative Wait Time (sec)”, but it wasn’t. It was instead “Network I/O”, which was approximately three times as high as Lock.

I have searched a bit for the detailed figures behind these categories, but have not been able to find the exact wait types in the group “Network I/O”. But I found several articles describing that a high value in “Network I/O” often would be the result if the application couldn’t handle the data from the SQL Server fast enough and not necessarily real network issues.

Is this “normal” for a NAV solution with high load, or is it really the network that is causing the problems?