Mystery laptop: the conclusion

I never really expected that my post about my laptop outperforming an 8-headed dragon of a server would draw that much attention: record number of first-day reads of any blog post on my blog ever (134), and record number of comments (11 comments, by 5 people, me included). Not a big deal, but I believe you deserve a conclusion, to know how it all ended.

To be honest, it didn’t.

The customer installed the SP2, we rebuilt the indexes and updated statistics, made sure that client configuration is the same as the client on my laptop (object cache, etc). The server did show some improvement: now it completes the job in just over 10 seconds (10,348 being the fastest, to be exact).

There are no obvious bottlenecks. Processor time is below 15%. There is no memory paging. The average disk queue length is below 0.01 at all times. With my laptop, it’s a different story - processor goes to 84%, with heavy paging (70+ pages/sec) and disk queue length jumping at over 4. Still, it completes the job in 6 seconds.

I honestly can’t think of anything that can draw such a poor performance from such a beast. It’s a general-purpose laptop, for crying out loud, with at least three bottlenecks, outperforming a dedicated, optimized, and probably oversized server. Huh?