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 getting pegged. This is a product from a vendor that has never 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).