We could go back and forth for weeks and not be able to help you with this. My recommendation is hire a professional to give your system a performance review....

1) Developers don't want to be bothered with RTFM (Read the Fine Manual). BTW, I was an officer in the US Navy in a past life, and I assure you...

Oh, and another Guruism specifically for Entity Framework, and this topic in particular:

Code First, Performance Last!!

Here's my Guruism related to ORMs (and numerous other things too):

Anything that allows developers to slap code together more quickly is inversely proportional to the performance and...

That is a common misstatement/misinterpretation Ed. The NCI is still usable, it...

David Klee and Denny Cherry have material on configuring/performance tuning for virtualized SQL Server workloads. VMWare has a huge document on configuring VMWare for SQL Server that was just updated...

Note that it is CRITICALLY IMPORTANT that you do NOT wrap a function around a column in the WHERE clause!!! Do filtering like Ed shows, not by using things like...

I advise clients to NEVER EVER EVER do code first. I also advise them that IF they MUST use an ORM, they MUST READ THE FINE MANUAL OR BE CRUSHED...

PLE is useless for this issue. It is data pages only. There are LOTS of other memory consumers that can get bottle necked. run DBCC MEMORYSTATUS to see them. It's...