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SQL Server 2012 SP2 Enterprise Edition. Users complaining of slowness. Monitoring tool shows highest wait event is CXPACKET.
Instance settings
Ran sp_BlitzCache (from the Brent Ozar toolset, those guys rock) for further diagnosis and results show queries with cost under 175 going parallel.
Anyone ever see Cost Threshold for Parallelism being ignored?
Anyone ever see Cost Threshold for Parallelism being ignored?
It is not being ignored. During the compilation process, the optimizer first considers a serial plan. If the estimated cost of that plan exceeds the Threshold, the optimizer goes on to look for a parallel plan. If the resulting parallel plan is costed below the best serial one, it will be chosen.
So, the parallel plan will have a lower cost that the serial one (which you cannot see). It is perfectly possible for the final parallel plan to have an estimated cost below the Threshold - the point is the best serial plan candidate exceeded the Threshold.
An example can be seen in my blog post on parallel plan bitmaps.
I'm pretty sure that sp_BlitzCache will show you the cost of the actual plan used for your queries, whereas the server will considers a parallel plan when the initially estimated cost exceeds the threshold value.
A noticable difference between estimated and actual query plan costs could happen if you have stale/bad statistics on your tables.
If you've identified a specific query that you want to run serially, you can add the following OPTION at the end of the statement - this will ensure a serial plan:
SELECT something
FROM somewhere
OPTION (MAXDOP 1);
Another option is to use the resource governor to control parallelism.
I,
It doesn't ignore!. setting this parameter is only saying: The optimizer uses that cost threshold to figure out when it should start evaluating plans that can use multiple threads. for example : let say, your sql server got 4 threads, 3 of those threads are in use,soo only 1 left to use . if at this time you running your query, than it doesn't matter if you parameter is set to 5 or 500. in that case your query will get 1 thread (no parallelism) even if the optimizer will get COST of 1000 .
