SQL Server 2005 Express in VMware causing very high CPU load

Question

I'm having the problems described in KB937745 - very high CPU usage and the Application Log is reporting something like this:

The client was unable to reuse a session with SPID SPID, which had been reset for connection pooling.

I've downloaded the hotfixes and I can't run them - I suspect it is because SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is not in the "Applies to" section of the KB:

The machine is running on an ESX 3.5 host running Windows XP (patched).

Result of:

SELECT  SERVERPROPERTY('productversion'), SERVERPROPERTY ('productlevel'), SERVERPROPERTY ('edition')

is

9.00.3068.00    SP2	Express Edition

Any ideas? I'm stumped why the CPU is so slammed. This is a product from a vendor that hasn't seen this kind of problem with several installations.

Answer 1

I found an article that might be of help.

Edit: The link above is now dead, but the Wayback Machine has a copy here.

The blog post states that

Finally we have identified the root cause of the issue is due to the activity on the database causing heavy usage of MARS [Multiple Active Result Sets]

which was a feature introduced in SQL Server 2005 (ref: here).