Press "Enter" to skip to content

Disable Priority Boost

Randolph West wants you to disable priority boost if you have it turned on:

It turns out that on one of the benchmarks, Microsoft was able to achieve higher throughput by setting the SQL Server process to HIGH_PRIORITY_CLASS, and the thread priority level over and above that to THREAD_PRIORITY_HIGHEST. While it was extremely helpful to beat artificial benchmarks, it came at the cost of giving SQL Server higher execution context on the CPU than almost every other process on Windows.

And that’s the only good use of priority boost ever. If you’ve never heard of priority boost, just keep on ignoring it.