Notification Services Considerations
When planning your Microsoft SQL Server Notification Services configuration, it is important to determine the processing and disk requirements needed at peak load periods. First analyze the hardware usage patterns, then establish your baselines according to your peak load requirements.
Peak Load Periods
Plan your hardware configuration based on peak load periods. For example, if a traffic reporting application supports scheduled subscriptions, and most users want traffic updates from 7:00 A.M. through 9:00 A.M. and from 4:00 P.M. through 6:00 P.M. local time, you must plan the system based on these periods, including peaks within the periods, rather than using 24-hour averages.
Hardware Usage Patterns
When you are planning the servers that host your notification applications and databases, consider the following:
- Notification generation is disk intensive, requiring heavy use of tempdb. Because generation occurs on the database server, the disk subsystem of the server that hosts the databases typically limits how many notifications an application can generate.
Therefore, you can improve the performance of SQL Server by using fast disk drives served by high performance controllers. Adding more storage capacity may increase notification generation capacity, but using fast drives with fast controllers will significantly improve performance.
The data removal process (vacuumer) removes obsolete event and notification data from an application database. To save disk space and to maintain performance, it is important to remove old data. You configure a data removal schedule per application in the application definition. For more information, see Configuring Data Removal. - Notification delivery is usually limited by processing power and delivery bandwidth. Formatting notifications requires ample processing power, and delivering notifications requires adequate bandwidth to the systems that deliver the notifications.
See Also
Concepts
Specifying Application Execution Settings
Planning a Notification Services System