We are slow to apply patches to our servers due to past experience of patches causing issues.
Last week we decided to update our application server and DB server with the latest patches. What resulted was an exercise in terror as our NAV instance practically came to a halt, causing us to have to shut down operations early one day, barely function another, and scramble to tune/config SQL. We wound up having a perfect storm of VM and patch problems all hitting at once. We did not discover a particular VM config issue until Wednesday, and it was definitely a large culprit (or so we thought).
We restored earlier images of the servers (pre patch) and saw immediate improvement. We set the patched VMs aside for further investigation after everything settled down with the intent of using them as the new testing servers. Yesterday, we restored a copy of the DB to the patched DB server and launched the application connecting via the patched application server and the performance is still abysmal. We decided to blow away the DB server entirely and do a fresh SQL install. We then restored a DB today to this fresh DB server. Connecting to this DB via the patched application server still resulted in a largely unusable client experience (very slow). This is with proper VM configuration and only a single user in the DB just looking around (no posting, etc.). I configured a new service tier on our production app server to connect to the test DB and the performance seems normal. This tells me the patched app server still has some sort of issue that ruins NAV.
Has anyone else had any issues with patching their app/DB servers? How up to date are everyone on these servers with respect to MS updates/patches? Any known offenders?
kind of fell into this...
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I know that patching SQL or NAV can have big impact on Performance, both positive and negative. I am very curious to this case and probably with me many others.
Have you run profiler? It can almost only be the engine that decides which index to use. It must use the wrong indexes. Do you keep counters on that?