• Could I go the whole production day without a checkpoint and just issue the checkpoint command before and after production time?

    How much RAM do you have on this system? How much is actually allocated to SQL Server? How much is actually being used day-to-day? Before the dirty pages are written to disk, they are on buffer cache. If you leave all of them there for a day, you might run out of RAM. I would only recommend if you from time to time, command a checkpoint when necessary. But again, if your bottle-neck is on disk IO, it will not help the long run. Your eventual goal is to have the system run smoothly auto-piloted.