Denny Cherry discusses the performance downsides of having too many NUMA nodes on a server:
At one client I was working with in 2015 they had a server which was configured very similarly to what I’ve described above. They had 32 cores, with 11 NUMA nodes. One NUMA node has 4 cores, the next 9 had three cores each, while the 11th NUMA node had one core in it.
When monitoring the performance on the server what we saw was that three cores were running at 100% (or close to it) while the other cores were running at about 4%.
The reason for this, is that SQL Server is NUMA aware, and it was trying to get the best performance possible out of the configuration that it had access to.
Moderation in everything. Also, it’s important to plan growth and check every once in a while for oddities like this.