Monitoring wait stats

This post, like last week’s, is based off the presentation I did to the DBA Fundamentals virtual chapter.

The request was for more details on the method I use to capture wait and file stats on servers, The methods are pretty similar, so I’ll show waits.

This is by no means the only way of doing it, it’s the way I do it.

Part the First: Capture job

This is the easy part. Into a job step goes the following:

INSERT  INTO Performance.dbo.WaitStats
SELECT  wait_type as WaitType,
        waiting_tasks_count AS NumberOfWaits,
        signal_wait_time_ms AS SignalWaitTime,
        wait_time_ms - signal_wait_time_ms AS ResourceWaitTime,
        GETDATE() AS SampleTime
FROM    sys.dm_os_wait_stats
WHERE   wait_time_ms > 0
    AND wait_type NOT IN (<list of waits to ignore>);

Schedule the job to run on an interval for a couple of days. I like to run it every 15 min, maybe every half an hour. I’m trying to get overall behaviour, not identify queries. If I need later to see what queries incur a particular wait, I can use an extended event session.

For the list of waits to ignore, I use Glenn’s list, the latest version found at http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/glenn/sql-server-diagnostic-information-queries-detailed-day-14/

I run this no less than a day, preferably a week if I can. 2-3 days is normally what I get.

Part the Second: Analysis script

The analysis script does two things:

• Get the wait times within an interval
• Pivot them so that I can easily graph in excel

To see which waits I want to include in the pivot, I look at the 20 waits with the highest increase in the interval monitored (this requires that the server wasn’t restarted during it).

I’m not necessarily going to graph and analyse all of them, but it does help ensure I don’t miss something interesting (like, for example, high LCK_M_Sch_S locks every day between 08:00 and 08:45)

For the purposes of this post, let’s say the ones I’m interested in for a particular analysis are LCK_M_IX, PAGELATCH_EX, LATCH_EX and IO_COMPLETION.

To be clear, those are for this example only. Do Not copy the below code and run without specifying the waits you’re interested in looking at, or the results are going to be less than useless.

The first thing I want to do is add a Row_Number based on the times the wait stats were recorded, so that I can join and take the difference between one interval and the next. In theory it should be possible to do this with times, but the insert doesn’t occur at exactly the same time, to the millisecond, each interval, hence this would require fancy date manipulation. Easier to use a ROW_NUMBER

SELECT  WaitType,
        NumberOfWaits,
        SignalWaitTime,
        ResourceWaitTime,
        SampleTime,
        ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY WaitType ORDER BY SampleTime) AS Interval
FROM    dbo.WaitStats
WHERE   WaitType IN ('LCK_M_IX', ‘PAGELATCH_EX’, 'LATCH_EX', 'IO_COMPLETION');

Next step, turn that into a CTE, join the CTE to itself with an offset and take the difference of the waiting tasks, the signal wait time and the resource wait time.

WITH    RawWaits
          AS (SELECT    WaitType,
                        NumberOfWaits,
                        SignalWaitTime,
                        ResourceWaitTime,
                        SampleTime,
                        ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY WaitType ORDER BY SampleTime) AS Interval
              FROM      dbo.WaitStats
              WHERE     WaitType IN ('LCK_M_IX', ‘PAGELATCH_EX’, 'LATCH_EX', 'IO_COMPLETION')
             )
    SELECT  w1.SampleTime,
            w1.WaitType AS WaitType,
            w2.NumberOfWaits - w1.NumberOfWaits AS NumerOfWaitsInInterval,
            w2.ResourceWaitTime - w1.ResourceWaitTime AS WaitTimeInInterval,
            w2.SignalWaitTime - w1.SignalWaitTime AS SignalWaitTimeInInterval
    FROM    RawWaits w1
            LEFT OUTER JOIN RawWaits w2 ON w2.WaitType = w1.WaitType
                                           AND w2.Interval= w1.Interval + 1;

Last step, pivot the results. This will pivot and show the resource wait. Change the column that’s in the select and the pivot to show the others. It doesn’t matter what aggregation function is used because there’s only one value in each interval, so sum, avg, min and max will all give the same result (just, don’t use count)

WITH    RawWaits
          AS (SELECT    WaitType,
                        NumberOfWaits,
                        SignalWaitTime,
                        ResourceWaitTime,
                        SampleTime,
                        ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY WaitType ORDER BY SampleTime) AS Interval
              FROM      dbo.WaitStats
              WHERE     WaitType IN ('LCK_M_IX', 'PAGELATCH_EX', 'LATCH_EX', 'IO_COMPLETION')
             ),
        WaitIntervals
          AS (SELECT    w1.SampleTime,
                        w1.WaitType AS WaitType,
                        w2.NumberOfWaits - w1.NumberOfWaits AS NumerOfWaitsInInterval,
                        w2.ResourceWaitTime - w1.ResourceWaitTime AS WaitTimeInInterval,
                        w2.SignalWaitTime - w1.SignalWaitTime AS SignalWaitTimeInInterval
              FROM      RawWaits w1
                        LEFT OUTER JOIN RawWaits w2 ON w2.WaitType = w1.WaitType
                                                       AND w2.Interval = w1.Interval + 1
             )
    SELECT  *
    FROM    (SELECT SampleTime, WaitType, WaitTimeInInterval FROM WaitIntervals
            ) p PIVOT ( AVG(WaitTimeInInterval) FOR WaitType IN ([LCK_M_IX], [PAGELATCH_EX], [LATCH_EX], [IO_COMPLETION]) ) AS pvt
    ORDER BY SampleTime;

And there we have a result that can easily be imported into excel (or R) and graphed or analysed further.