Mike Walsh recommends ensuring your servers are not using any form of power saving mode:
Balanced power mode has a major impact on SQL Server performance. Simply put, you’ve told Windows Server (through Control Panel) or your server hardware (through BIOS settings) to sacrifice a few performance-minded things for the sake of using a little less power. In fact, in plenty of studies and blog posts by folks in the community (including this post by Glenn Berry), you can see the effect of CPU power saving, especially. In essence, the CPUs will run at a lower clock multiplier when demand isn’t deemed high enough, and that clock speed will only increase when demand is high enough for long enough. This results in a slower CPU speed during normal operations. That setting actually works well on my laptop or tablet when I want to conserve battery life and don’t have a workload that is sensitive to CPU speed.
For a SQL Server, though? That is horrible for performance. Windows balanced mode also can cause other components to run slower or behave differently than when the server is running in High Performance mode. For instance, USB ports can be underpowered and network interfaces can be under-powered or even go to sleep. Frankly, for a SQL Serve, nothing good comes out of these modes.
Read on for a few methods for checking whether your servers are affected.