Local and Remote Connections question

Hello all,

We are currently testing all our applications on Vista and SQL Server 2005. Everything is running and working, but our applications that connect to SQL Server 2005 are running very slow. We have our client installed on a vista pc running SQL Server 2005 on the same pc. I was trying to troubleshoot the problem and realized that we had "Local connections only" checked in the Surface Area Configuration tool, and changed it to "Local and remote connections". After making this change all our apps seem to be running much faster. I just didn't expect this to be the problem since we were connecting from the same computer that is running the server. Can anyone explain to me why this has made the difference in performance?

Thanks for your time and attention,

DrewV

Hi DrewV,

How many connections were you attempting to sql server through your application(s).

How much memory do you have on the box and how much memory is configured for SQL Server?

regards

Jag

|||

There is only one connection being opened by our app.

The machine is a brand new Dell Precision 390 with 2GB or ram.

We are running SQL Express which I think uses a max of 1GB.

It is almost like it is trying to connect with a "remote" connection and trying locally after the first attempt fails. I just don't understand why since we are running on the same machine.

|||

I'm only guessing here, but the local connections system generally uses shared memory to pass the information between the client and server avoiding the network protocols. However this requires an area of memory which is accessible to both processes.

It may be that this is seen as a security weakpoint in Vista (direct access to non-process specific memory ... hmmm) so that there is a significant amount of checking and policing of such access which did not occur before and so slows down the whole process. The remote connection goes through the network stack and so is probably considered less of a vulnerability and so does not need the extra control.

Maybe SQL Server 2005 prefers on Vista to use the tcp/ip stack (if available) rather than shared memory (because it will be faster) - but this is only possible if you enable remote as well as local connections.

Also you don't say which service pack of SQL Server 2005 you are using.

|||Thanks for your response. We are on Service Pack 2.