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Gabriel Guimarães
Asked: 2011-02-24 02:19:40 +0800 CST

setting MAXDOP server default value

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Hi I've a server with 2 physical processors with 8 cores each.

Looking through Management Studio Shows me a tree with NUMA 0 and NUMA 1 and inside 8 childs.

The current maxdop is on 0, should I set a different maxdop for the server? If so this should be 2 or 16? Should MAXDOP be based on physical or logical processors count?

Thanks, any help is appreciated. Gabriel

sql-server sql-server-2008 sql-server-2008-r2

2 Answers

  1. This article from Microsoft has some good general guidelines for setting MAXDOP. In general, you'd want to base this off of logical processor count, and you'd want to set it to 8 for a system with 8 or more processors. We have a system with 64 logical processors, and we see extreme performance problems when this is set to 0. We have it at 8, and it seems to work pretty well. Your best bet is to experiment with a few settings while under your normal load and see how it performs.

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  2. MAXDOP should be zero unless you have a clear, defined issue caused by the default setting.

    I'd do nothing unless I had to, most likely under direction of MS PSS.

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