Stop Using Balanced Power with SQL Server

The OS default Power Plan for Windows is Balanced Power. This can cause degraded overall performance for SQL Server. Balanced Power is a great concept to help conserve energy by scaling the processor performance based on current CPU utilization, however it isn’t conducive to SQL Server workloads.

For SQL Server, I always ask organizations to disable this feature in the BIOS to ensure that regardless of the Windows setting or Group Policy, it is disabled.

Another quick fix is to set the power plan to High Performance. This works really well, however for a lot of organizations, they apply “Balanced Power” through a group policy, so even if you manually set it to High Performance, it will revert back. You then have to get them to make an exception in the GPO for your SQL Servers. This is an appropriate thing to do, but I’ve had an administrator change at an organization happen and the new admin applied new “best practices’ to the GPO’s which then switched SQL Server power plans back to “Balanced”.

Regardless of what method you use, just make sure that your really expensive SQL Servers aren’t out there with their CPU’s reduced in clock speed due to the OS power plan.