I have encouraging news! The CPU powersaving mode was enabled and setting this to High Performance mode did improve performance significantly on the new box.

Rather than running the app each time I have a basic powershell script that selects records in a loop and it was running at ~1400 selects/sec and now has hit just over 2000 /sec. I can't believe servers default to power saving mode!

While this news is encouraging, it is still not beating our 4 year old server which comfortably does 2400 selects /sec.

These tests are all being run locally on the box so network traffic can be ruled out.

I have been monitoring the basic perfmon (CPU, page faults, disk idle, disk queue, cache hit ratio, etc) nothing stands out showing the system is stressed. Profiler traces have a large impact on performance and dont tell me anything I dont know (although I may not be tracing the right thing!)

The app does use a connection string with a SQL login but does use connection pooling so I dont think this is having any tangable impact. Also I am doing my select test in powershell which is using 2008 provider.

Should I see anything in the Wait Types if these are very simple selects looking up on a clustered index, the entire database is in RAM anyway (cache hit ratio 100%) and the server is otherwise idle?

I am open to suggestions of what I need to look at in profiler or perfmon to better get an idea of what is causing the slowdown...

Thanks again for the help so far.

ProductVersion 10.50.2500.0

ProductLevel SP1

IsClustered 0