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Some Waits Just Need Ignoring

Paul Randal explains that not all SQL Server wait types are pernicious:

Wait statistics analysis is one of my favorite things to talk about because it’s so incredibly useful for performance tuning and can dramatically shorten the time it takes to zero in on the root cause of a performance problem. But you have to do it correctly. You can’t just do a SELECT * FROM sys.dm_os_wait_stats. Various people have published scripts online to aggregate and display wait statistics in an actionable way, and my script is one of the most popular (latest version is always in this post).

One question I’m often asked is why does my script have a list of wait types that it specifically filters out? The answer is that those wait types are what I call ‘benign’ – they’re usually not a problem but happen frequently enough from regular SQL Server operations that they would show up as the top waits and so would obscure the waits that you can do something about.

Read on for the rest of the story.