Sean Gallardy is here to demystify a concept:
IO Completion Ports are a set of Windows APIs which allow for efficient, fast, multithreaded asynchronous IO. Great, that pretty much tells you nothing.
SQL Server uses IO Completion Ports not for disk-based IO but for general network IO when it comes into SQL Server for TDS level items. This means it’s used for things such as connecting to an instance of SQL Server, sending batch and rpc information, etc., and is used to properly take actions on the incoming items. These actions should be extremely short and quick, the name of the game is low latency and high throughput which means not doing things like reading or writing from disk, allocating memory, calling functions that may block, etc., to keep things flowing.
Read on to see what happens when there is a problem and what might cause that problem.