First, I'd stick to using 1222. It has better information than 1204. Second, yes, these are very lightweight processes. They don't put excessive load on the system. They capture the deadlock graph output from the deadlock into the error log. If they're going to put any kind of load on the system, it's during the writes to the error log. But I've run them for years on systems without ever hitting issues, so I have no trouble recommending their use.