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I had heard that you could have too many VLFs in your transaction log, and it could cause performance issues. Kimberly Tripp has a great blog on how to get better performance from your log, but until I was studying for the MCM, I didn’t realize you could have too few.
The issue seems to be that if you allocate too much transaction log at once, you could end up with a few, very, very large (GB in size) VLFs, and despite regular log backups, you could not be clearing any VLFs inside the log until there are no active transactions in that VLF. And that could cause a performance slowdown as it clears that large VLF.
How are VLFs allocated? Here’s the formula:
- chunks less than 64MB = 4 VLFs
- chunks of 64MB and less than 1GB = 8 VLFs
- chunks of 1GB and larger = 16 VLFs
This is from : http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/KIMBERLY/post/Transaction-Log-VLFs-too-many-or-too-few.aspx#ixzz19KysnYcK
So if you need 50GB of log space, do as Kim recommends and get 512MB chunks by allocating 8GB at a time. You can do this contiguously, as in all the same day, but allocate 8GB, let it finish, then ALTER to add 8GB more, repeat until you reach the correct size.
Posted by Glenn Berry on 30 December 2010
I think Paul and Kimberly have an update where they advocate growing the log file in an 8000MB increment (rather than 8GB) since there is an issue when you grow it in exact 4GB multiples.
I have had very good luck at NewsGator growing my log files in roughly 8000MB increments to get to my desired size (which is based on my log generation rate and log backup frequency).
Just be aware that growing your log file in a relatively large chunk will take a bit since the allocation has to be zeroed out (Windows Instant File Initialization does not work on log files).
Posted by NULLgarity on 30 December 2010
Due to a bug described here (www.sqlskills.com/.../Bug-log-file-growth-broken-for-multiples-of-4GB.aspx), the recommendation is now 8,000 MB rather than 8 GB.
Posted by Jason Brimhall on 30 December 2010
Nice to have reminders like this. Thanks Steve.