A thread is the lowest unit of execution. Your SQL query, at the least, needs one thread to run. Depending on the SQL instance configurations and the eligibility of the query, SQL Server may decide to execute your query with multiple threads – this is called parallelism. If too many such workloads are parallelized and if they are long-running, your subsequent incoming queries might not even get one thread to run. In other words, they will be waiting for a thread to be assigned to them because SQL Server has a limited number of threads (by default) based on the number of processors on the hardware. This wait is called THREADPOOL. It is not a good situation to be in and may go unnoticed. If you are facing this wait type, consider reducing parallelism (one of the ways). Consider increasing the Cost Threshold of Parallelism (server config) so that not all inexpensive workloads go in parallel. Or change the MAXDOP value to a reasonable number, say 4. Especially on hardware with a lot of cores. Maybe you can set MAXDOP to the number of cores per NUMA node. This will reduce parallelism and thereby make more threads available in the thread pool. Sounds interesting? Watch the video below.

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