SQL Server Agent Job Running Slow

Question

I am executing a stored procedure using SQL Server Agent Job in SQL Server 2005.

This job was running fast until yesterday. Since yesterday this job is taking more tha

Answer 1

I have a similar issue with a script that calls a number of UDFs that I created. The UDF's themselves normally run subsecond under SSMS. Likewise, running the reports I generate with them is bearable under SSMS (30d data in 8s, 365d data in 22s). I've always done NOCOUNT ON with my SQL Agent jobs as they normally generate text files out for pickin up by other processes or Excel and I do not want the extra data at the end, so it was not a solution for me.

In this case, when we run the exact same script under SQL Agent as a job, my times grow exponentially. My 8s script takes 2m30s and my 22s script takes 2h20m. This is the same whether I run it midday with other user activity and jobs or after hours with no user activity, nor jobs or backups running. Our server is idle and at best I get one of the 8 cores being utilized when run. DB is only about 10GB running on SSD with a cached RAID card and 16 of 32GB RAM is free. Since my SQL runs efficiently in SSMS, I am pretty well of the belief that I am hitting a threading limit of some sort. I have researched and tried adjusting MAXDOP just prior to the scripts in the SQL Agent with no luck.

Since this is an activity I want to schedule, it needs to be automated one way or another. I could let these scripts take the hours they need to run as SQL steps in SQL Agent jobs, but I decided to run from command line instead and I get the same performance I see in SSMS.

    sqlcmd -S SQLSRVRHost -i "C:\My Script Loc With Spaces.sql" -v MyVar="VarValue" >"C:\MyOutputFile.txt"

So I created a batch script with the SQL jobs run from sqlcmd. Then I run the batch script from a SQL Agent job, so I still have the same management and control in place. My 4 SQL jobs that collectively took over 3 hours to run complete in 1 min and a few seconds from a single batch script executed by SQL Agent.

I hope this helps...