Measuring Cost Threshold for Parallelism Effectiveness

Michael Swart gets out the ruler:

The configuration setting cost threshold for parallelism has a default value of 5. As a default value, it’s probably too low and should be raised. But what benefit are we hoping for? And how can we measure it?

The database that I work with is a busy OLTP system with lots of very frequent, very inexpensive queries and so I don’t like to see any query that needs to go parallel.

What I’d like to do is raise the configuration cost threshold to something larger and look at the queries that have gone from multi-threaded to single-threaded. I want to see that these queries become cheaper on average. By cheaper I mean consume less cpu. I expect the average duration of these queries to increase.

Read on for Michael’s results, and I appreciate somebody actually testing and measuring rather than pulling a number from a hat.