Thank you for all your responses.

I have just checked for the error (I/O is frozen on Database) in the logs and did not see this at all. I was not able to find anything that corresponds to the blocking time frame in either SQL or Windows Logs.

We are currently using Veeam for backups running fulls once a week, diffs nightly, and logs hourly. There is no correpandance on time there either unless we are talking VM snapshots which I will need to reach out to my IT staff for. Not seeing anything in the logs indicating high IO times.

The query is a single record delete and all queries being blocked are for this same table. The head blocker has no wait type but hangs indefinitely until manually killed. Query (delete from table where record_id = @theSourceID). I do not see other DBs being blocked but I do see some coming in on Master due to the linked server/synonym calls which are being blocked. These appear to be being blocked by themselves but the number grows exponentially when this blocking starts to occur. Some do reference the same DB.Table and others do not. I am starting to think that its all the linked server/synonym stuff that is what causing the multi db tension issues.

Since we are a MS partner we have hours to burn. Currently we are getting paged if the blocking last longer than a minute so I thought I would put in my due diligence before reaching out. But admittedly I am reaching the end of my skill set. I would like more to learn how to identify and resolve these more than I would like to be told here is the fix. Troubleshooting linked server and synonym calls has been a pretty steep learning curve much less the blocking issues we are currently experiencing.

Thanks for any more advice you may have for me.

Jeremy