The CSS SQL Server Engineers team talks about a new scheduling algorithm in SQL Server 2016:
SQL Server 2016 gets a scalability boost from scheduling updates. Testing uncovered issues with the percentile scheduling based algorithms in SQL Server 2012 and 2014. A large, CPU quantum worker and a short, CPU quantum worker can receive unbalanced access to the scheduling resources.
Take the following example. Worker 1 is a large, read query using read ahead and in-memory database pages and Worker 2 is doing shorter activities. Worker 1 finds information already in buffer pool and does not have to yield for I/O operations. Worker 1 can consume its full CPU quantum.
On the other hand, Worker 2 is performing operations that require it to yield. For discussion let’s say Worker 2 yields at 1/20th of its CPU, quantum target. Taking resource governance and other activities out of the picture the scheduling pattern looks like the following.
I’m going to have to reserve judgment on this. It’s been in Azure SQL Database for a while, so I’m not expecting bugs, but I wonder if there are any edge cases in which performance gets worse as a result of this.