I was talking to someone recently and this person had a large transaction load on their SQL Server. At least, I thought it was a large load. This person said they experienced 1000tps most of the time and this made maintenance, DR planning, and more a challenge. That's a lot lower than the TPCe performance system that has 4,614tps, but it's nothing to sneer at. That feels like a significant load to me.

However it's been awhile since I worked on a variety of systems as a consultant. I often see the forums at SQLServerCentral showing only tens of transactions/sec, based on the performance data that you can see at monitor.red-gate.com. This is the actual data from our servers and it seems like a low number to me.

This week I was trying to decide what 1000tps really means. Is this a busy system, maybe even an edge case if this is the average for your system over a week or month? Is it a representative system for many companies? I wanted to see what others report from their systems this week:

What are your average and peak tps for most of the systems you manage?

I'd like to hear about 1 or 2 systems that you consider to representative of the loads in your environment. Taken across your business time, whether that's 9-5, 24x7 or something else, can you get the average and peak values for your transactions/sec and disclose them? You don't need to let us know about your application or company, though industry would be nice.

I'm curious how busy systems are for some of you and whether this presents you with challenges for migration, upgrades, virtualization, DR, maintenance or more.

Steve Jones

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