What I learned tonight – tempdb size when SQL starts

I went to the April monthly meeting of the Chicago SQL Server User Group tonight to see Brad McGehee (Blog | Twitter). Brad’s in town to present at SQLSaturday # 31 in Chicago and he also gave a talk to us tonight on optimizing tempdb performance.

It was a good session because it went over tempdb and best practices. Most of the information I already knew but it’s always good to hear it again, even as a refresher. And there’s usually something I took for granted but was wrong about. And tonight was no exception.

I knew that the data and log files for tempdb are recreated when the SQL service starts. But I thought that tempdb got it’s db options from the model database. For instance, if the model database is set at 2 MB for the data and 1 MB for the log then tempdb would inherit those same settings. But i was wrong. As Brad mentioned tonight, tempdb starts out as 8 MB for the data and the log file is 1 MB. On my laptop its’s actually 512 KB but maybe I heard him wrong.

Anyway, to properly resize tempdb you should run the ALTER DATABASE command…

USE master;
GO

ALTER DATABASE tempdb 
MODIFY FILE ( NAME = 'tempdev', SIZE = 25600KB , FILEGROWTH = 5120KB );
GO

ALTER DATABASE tempdb 
MODIFY FILE ( NAME = 'templog', SIZE = 2048KB , FILEGROWTH = 1024KB );
GO

…and tempdb will be correctly resized after every restart. And you’ve heard that you should create multiple tempdb files depending on the number of CPU’s you have? Well, just do that at the same time. Here I’m renaming, moving, resizing, and adding a file to tempdb; 

USE master;
GO

ALTER DATABASE tempdb 
MODIFY FILE (NAME = 'tempdev', NEWNAME = 'tempdev1', FILENAME = 'C:\SQL2008\DATA\tempdev1.mdf');
GO

ALTER DATABASE tempdb 
MODIFY FILE (NAME = 'templog', FILENAME = 'C:\SQL2008\DATA\templog.ldf');
GO

ALTER DATABASE tempdb 
MODIFY FILE (NAME = 'tempdev1', SIZE = 25600KB , FILEGROWTH = 5120KB);
GO

ALTER DATABASE tempdb 
MODIFY FILE (NAME = 'templog', SIZE = 2048KB , FILEGROWTH = 1024KB);
GO

ALTER DATABASE tempdb 
ADD FILE (NAME = 'tempdev2', 
          FILENAME = 'C:\SQL2008\DATA\tempdev2.ndf', 
          SIZE = 25600KB , FILEGROWTH = 5120KB);
GO

The usual disclaimers go here. Don’t use this script without understanding it as it can screw up your server. Don’t use it in production until you’ve testes it.

And I’ll leave the discussion of multiple tempdb files for now.