Yeah, it does sound like contention. Since it's a restore, the most likely place is IO, but it's also going to affect CPU, memory, etc. I would look at sys.dm_exec_requests to see what resources are being used by the restore process and if it's causing blocking of other processes. If it's causing blocking, this view will also show what resources are causing the block. From that determination, you can figure out what else you need to do. There are a couple of tricks you can try to speed up restore operations. I've documented them in an article on Simple-Talk.[/url]