This is such an open ended question with a wide range of possibilities, but wanted to ask on this forum to see if I can get some help.
We have an application that I have very little knowledge of and I am the only SQL DB person so I have been asked to trouble shoot frequent slowdowns in this application. The way it is setup is typical of other applications I've seen. You have the user clients connecting to the application server. And the application server talks to the SQL Server. I'm not a network or a software architect so that is the best way I can describe it.
Anyway, the users often experience their client application freezing and not responding. When that happens, I am not sure where the slow down is. Is it a jam between the application client and the application server. Or is it a jam between the application server and the SQL server? How would I know this? Or am I even asking the right question?
One pattern we have observed is that if we restart the SQL Server service then the slow down and the freezing goes away. So the team suspects there is some kind of constraint on the SQL Server. If this was true, what are some system queries, perfmon stats, and other monitors I can run on SQL Server to see if there is any kind of corelation between the application freezing and some resource constraint on SQL Server?
I've looked at CPU and Memory on SQL Server machine and I don't see any spikes during these periods of slowdowns. I don't think it is blocked processes either. Those are the two things that I know how to check. What are some other checks I can do using system views (and whatever other methods) to try to get some direction on how to trouble shoot this?