I would say you should always have index maintenance and statistics update jobs in place, albeit they should be driven by actual fragmentation levels or amounts of changed data, rather than arbitrary choice. If you don't have something already I would look at Ola Hallengren's[/url] or Minion Reindex[/url] by Sean and Jen McCown. Both are excellent. That being said, it's difficult to tell if performance problems are caused by things like out of date statistics or fragmented indexes without more detail.