How many non-clustered indexes do you have on the table?

The more indexes you have, the more stuff it needs to look at to delete.  If you can disable all of...

It depends on what the job is doing.  Since memory and CPU don't appear to be the bottleneck (their utilization is low), finding the bottleneck and improving on it would...

If you are going with Scott's approach, step 1 of the job would be to start the job you want to monitor.  Next, you wait for some period of time...

That one I am completely stumped on then.

Just to be sure, auto-shrink isn't turned on on any database, right?  My thoughts here are that something is growing and shrinking when...

Ok, that is a weird one... I have no good thoughts on why that would be happening nor why adding an explicit transaction would help.

When you say "randomly failing", is...

Could it be a bug in the unit test?  What I mean is if the unit test is checking the number of active transactions and sometimes it comes back with...

Not sure if it is the best way, but I just set up a second job that starts at the same time as the one I wanted to monitor and...

If you look at the code behind the view INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS, it is looking at USER objects only:

CREATE VIEW INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
AS
SELECT
DB_NAME()AS TABLE_CATALOG,
SCHEMA_NAME(o.schema_id)AS TABLE_SCHEMA,
o.nameAS TABLE_NAME,
c.nameAS COLUMN_NAME,
COLUMNPROPERTY(c.object_id, c.name, 'ordinal')AS ORDINAL_POSITION,
convert(nvarchar(4000),
OBJECT_DEFINITION(c.default_object_id))AS COLUMN_DEFAULT,
convert(varchar(3),...

How is the page file utilization while CPU is spiking like that?  If page file utilization is starting to climb while the CPU is spiking, it might indicate something is...

I could be mistaken, but I thought all of the xp_ stored procedures were deprecated?

Not sure if this is relevant or not, but:

http://tomaslind.net/2014/01/28/alternative-xp_fixeddrives/

relevant section:

SELECT DISTINCT
  ...

• This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by Mr. Brian Gale.

Both of those questions should be new posts as they are unrelated to the original post.  Replying to an old post with an unrelated question is not likely to get...

For those curious, in Windows you can still use xp_cmdshell and run fsutil volume diskfree <driveletter> where "<driveletter>" is the drive letter name such as "fsutil volume diskfree C:".

a lot...

As you have access to the server, what happens if you run the TSQL indicated in the second INFO message you posted above:

BACKUP DATABASE [Tfs_DefaultCollection] TO DISK...

My first thought on this is that the one SSAS cube is different than the others which is apparent to me since it uses all the CPU.  Now, the code...

Can you log into the server via SSMS?  If so, I would try running the backup command in the INFO message manually and see what error you get back.

If you...