Recently I found a poorly performing server and I could not figure out why with all of the usual troubleshooting techniques.  Something told me to look at some of the configuration settings and there it was shining like a crazy diamond.  The sp_configure option ‘max worker threads’ was set to a value of 16.  Seriously?

Now my curiosity was piqued.  There are experts who change settings like this because they know what they are doing.  Generally, I do not monkey around with these types of settings unless I have a really good reason to do so, and no a vendor telling me to do it is not a good reason unless this SQL Server is dedicated solely to them, which it is not!  Best practices says to leave this at zero so that SQL Server can manage the number of worker threads for optimal performance.  Who am I to think that I know better than some really smart guys from Redmond?  After doing some light reading on the subject, I learned that too few threads can cause “thread starvation” where there are not enough threads to service the incoming client requests resulting in poor performance.

In addition, setting this value too high can waste memory and also be detrimental to performance.  In conclusion, do not monkey around with the settings unless you know what you are doing.  That is all!

Enjoy!