Some naive questions the numbers in sysprocesses. What I conclude by looking at the numbers cpu, physical_io, memusage
Do any of these numbers sum to a finite amount? Also, I notice that when I run a query, that the status beomes 'runnable'. When the query stops it becomes 'sleeping'. However the resources-used figures are still up Am I still consuming these resources?
Hi,
Straight from Books Online:
cpu: Cumulative CPU time for the process.
physical_io: Cumulative disk reads and writes for the process.
Since they are cumulative,they won't sum to anything. I'm fairly certain things haven't changed (much) since this article where they define cpu as milliseconds of user-mode time consumed by the process and physical_io as synchronous reads and writes.
memusage: Number of pages in the procedure cache that are currently allocated to this process. A negative number indicates that the process is freeing memory allocated by another process.
This is a currently allocated number, so this is indeed the actual number of pages allocated to that process.
It's tough to draw a conclusion alone from cpu and physical_io as the numbers are cumulative. Though often inconclusive, I personally just use the columns to find outliers when diagnosing an issue.