SUSPENDED Sessions Waiting on PAGELATCH_UP and PAGELATCH_SH � Solution

June 26, 2019

Pinal Dave
SQL Performance
No Comments
Today, I have interesting experience while working with a client on Comprehensive
Database Performance Health Check. I was working with Sr. DBA on optimizing their
SQL Server. While working on it, we realized there was an issue with how their file
configured for one of their major databases. As soon as we fixed that issue,
suddenly their application started to run at rapid speed. However, the joy of
fixing the server did not last long as within a few minutes their server got
tremendously slow with many sessions suspending in the status of SUSPENDED status
and they were waiting on PAGELATCH_UP and PAGELATCH_SH. I have fixed many such
scenarios in the past but the way this scenario showed up this was very strange.

SQL SERVER - SUSPENDED Sessions Waiting on PAGELATCH_UP and PAGELATCH_SH - Solution

suspended-800x270

Suspended Status
Suspended Status means that the request currently is inactive because it is waiting
on a resource and there is a good chance the request will start once the needed
resource will be available.

Solarwinds
When I started to see the queries are suspended with the wait stat of PAGELATCH_UP
and PAGELATCH_SH, it was immediately clear to me that this may be due to some
internal SQL Server issue which was unrevealed as soon as I fixed the major
blocking issue with the file.

Solution
After carefully looking at the situation, and evaluating various different
performance tuning configuration issues, I realized that the issue was due to
another misconfiguration of the TempDb. I noticed that there was a single tempdb
file on the same drive as their data drive and was creating a performance issue. We
immediately moved that file to a different drive and added few more (in our case 3
more) TempDB datafiles (ndf) and our performance issues were automatically resolved
and all the queries got unsuspended. After a few minutes, the entire backlog was
cleared the client got unparallel performance.