There are a number of things you might want to check

Size of finished backup file - are they the same ?

How do you back up - via a maint plan...

the cxpacket is a parallelism wait - you might want to experiment with the maxdop statement to see if using less procs speeds things up.

I see this with poor/complex sql...

I've applied the sp on non awe servers with no ill effects

It's worth noting that ( I was told at a sql technet nmeeting ) that the sp_oa procs/processes are not thread safe and can cause memory leaks. On a multi...

you can also look in sysperfinfo table for the information

select * from master.dbo.sysperfinfo where counter_name like '%server memory%'

When using extended memory I've found it's usually better to set min and...

Oh sorry - horizontal table partitioning using partitioned views is another option.

The hardware option is to increase the number of spindles on the data drive - say your current drive...

check out Kalen Delaney's books for advice. Build a secondary covered index to match your query - covered indexes will perform as well as as a clustered index.

Your other option...

I use this proc for blanket rebuilds - I also use other more selective methods but this is a handy method. Put the proc in master and call from any...

When looking at SQL Server setup it might be worthy of a visit to microsoft for their sql setup, I've previously used 14 disk raid 10 arrays ( 2 )...

Experiance has shown ( for me ) that where the sql servers are connected to a company SAN used for many other servers the performance is seriously lacking compared to...

both #temp tables and table variables may be created in memory, likewise both may be created in tempdb.

I can't help with your exact query - but - there's a posting to say that sql dmo is not thread safe and can cause memory leaks and such.  NB...

I have a similar problem with a simple 3 table join in a proc which table scans ( to return 1 row ) but if the query is put in...

not normally although if your server runs under a domain service account you'll have to change it. The safest is to make your service accounts the local system before the...

I think the best route is to make sure your box has sufficient horsepower to cope with intrusive monitoring. I use profile and other tools and the best methods seem...