Jonathan Kehayias dives into an interesting problem:
A few weeks ago, an interesting question was asked on the #SQLHelp hash tag on Twitter about the impact of execution plans on the ASYNC_NETWORK_IO wait type, and it generated some differing opinions and a lot of good discussion.
My immediate answer to this would be that someone is misinterpreting the cause and effect of this, since the ASYNC_NETWORK_IO wait type is encountered when the Engine has results to send over TDS to the client but there are no available TDS buffers on the connection to send them on. Generally speaking, this means that the client side is not consuming the results efficiently, but based on the ensuing discussion I became intrigued enough to do some testing of whether or not an execution plan would actually impact the ASYNC_NETWORK_IO waits significantly.
To summarize: Focusing on ASYNC_NETWORK_IO waits alone as a tuning metric is a mistake. The faster a query executes, the higher this wait type will likely accumulate, even if the client is consuming results as fast as possible. (Also see Greg’s recent post about focusing on waits alone in general.)
Click through for the things Jonathan tested.