Press "Enter" to skip to content

Indirect Checkpoint And Non-Yielding Scheduler Problems

Parikshit Savjani has a post describing an issue you might experience with indirect checkpoint post SQL Server-2012:

One of the scenarios where skewed distribution of dirty pages in the DPList is common is tempdb. Starting SQL Server 2016, indirect checkpoint is turned ON by default with target_recovery_time set to 60 for model database. Since tempdb database is derived from model during startup, it inherits this property from model database and has indirect checkpoint enabled by default. As a result of the skewed DPList distribution in tempdb, depending on the workload, you may experience excessive spinlock contention and exponential backoffs on DPList on tempdb. In scenarios when the DPList has grown very long, the recovery writer may produce a non-yielding scheduler dump as it iterates through the long list (20k-30k) and tries to acquire spinlock and waits with exponential backoff if spinlock is taken by multiple IOC routines for removal of pages.

This is worth taking a close read.