Wednesday 18 December 2013

Max degree of Parallelism in SQL Server

I was asked to review the Max Degree of Parallelism (MDOP) settings for one of our CRM database servers. Reading some of the web blogs, there appeared to be conflicting information out there regarding the optimum settings should be. Some have suggested that you should leave the default setting, some suggest reducing it 1 for servers serving high numbers of connections.

First lets describe what this parameter actually does.

The Max Degree of Parallelism dictates how many CPU cores SQL Server can dedicate to any single query. SQL Server is able to process parts of a query in parallel and dedicate multiple cores of CPU to the processing of that query. This parallel approach can be used when the query is retrieving data from multiple sources or to help process a particular part of a query. Part of that query’s execution time is to calculate how many cores should be used to process the query, so part of the motivation behind setting this to a value of 1 is that this portion of the query execution can be bypassed as SQL knows only one core should be used.

The MDOP setting is adjusted with the following command, and is applied server-wide immediately:

sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1;
GO
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE;
GO
sp_configure 'max degree of parallelism', 8;
GO
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE;
GO

As part of my investigation I used Profiler to extract a particularly long-running query on our database. The query was extracting all of the Active records of an entity, and sort them by a timestamp field. Because the entity was a CRM entity, the data was spread across the two CRM tables: the Base table where the entity management takes place and the ExtensionBase table where the user-defined data is stored, including my timestamp field. So SQL was generating a query which was essentially this:

SELECT [columns]
FROM [base table] B
INNER JOIN [extension table] E ON B.Id = E.Id
WHERE B.StateCode = 0 AND B.DeletionStateCode = 0
ORDER BY E.[Timestamp field]

Isolating the query and running it in Query Analyzer, I could see that SQL was querying the data from the Base table and Extension table, merging them and sorting the results. According to the execution plan, the results sort was taking 77% of the execution time. By varying the MDOP setting from 1 to 8, the query execution time varied from 24 seconds (MDOP=1), 6 seconds (MDOP=4) and 4.7 seconds (MDOP=8). It was clear then that the Sort part of the query was able to make use of the additional cores to return a quicker result.

What you then have to weigh up is that if you have several long-running queries running simultaneously and using many cores, there may be very limited CPU available for other operations.

Setting a value of 0 allows SQL to allocate all cores to a single query. Set it to this value if your database is used sporadically, but when you do query the database it is a large query and you want the results as soon as possible.


So in conclusion, reducing the MDOP to a very low value could result in long execution times, setting it to a high value (or zero) will throttle the number of queries that can execute at the same time. Depending on the number of cores available and how many parallel tasks you are trying to perform, you should set the MDOP to a compromise between the two. Setting it to a very low value can have a negative impact on the execution time of your query. If you aren’t sure what you are doing, best to leave it to the default setting but there may be good reason to set play with different settings, if the server isn’t performing as you want it to.

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