My tests DO reflect the total picture... just not on your machine. 😉 They show the test results on my machine. It's obvious that my machine is different than yours (mine cannot do parallelism... it only has 1 CPU, for example) so I'm setting up to do the tests on a more modern machine than my 8 year old desktop. We'll see soon.

Please post the CREATE TABLE statement for your Tally Table. Be sure to include any indexes it may have. It would also be helpful to know what your default COLLATION is, please. We need to make sure we're comparing apples to apples. Thanks.

And to be sure, the only thing I care about right now is splitting things that are 8k or less. We already know that JOINing to a MAX column is terrible for performance and that a While Loop is one of the ways to go there.