Blog Post

MCM Prep - VLF Allocations

,

I had heard that you could have too many VLFs in your transaction log, and it could cause performance issues. Kimberly Tripp has a great blog on how to get better performance from your log, but until I was studying for the MCM, I didn’t realize you could have too few.

The issue seems to be that if you allocate too much transaction log at once, you could end up with a few, very, very large (GB in size) VLFs, and despite regular log backups, you could not be clearing any VLFs inside the log until there are no active transactions in that VLF. And that could cause a performance slowdown as it clears that large VLF.

How are VLFs allocated? Here’s the formula:

  • chunks less than 64MB = 4 VLFs
  • chunks of 64MB and less than 1GB = 8 VLFs
  • chunks of 1GB and larger = 16 VLFs

This is from : http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/KIMBERLY/post/Transaction-Log-VLFs-too-many-or-too-few.aspx#ixzz19KysnYcK

So if you need 50GB of log space, do as Kim recommends and get 512MB chunks by allocating 8GB at a time. You can do this contiguously, as in all the same day, but allocate 8GB, let it finish, then ALTER to add 8GB more, repeat until you reach the correct size.

Rate

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

Share

Share

Rate

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating