What's new with NUMA in SQL Server?

Is there any way to get a reading, from SQL Server or perfmon or hardware vendor tools or VM tools, of how much you are crossing NUMA boundaries, and what that is costing?

The only "NUMA management" trick I know is setting maxdop at or below the number of cores on a physical processor.  I guess the rest is supposed to be automagic.

Is there anything else one can see or do regarding NUMA?

Thanks,

Josh

What's new with NUMA in SQL Server?

Nothing that I know. NUMA was basically introduced for scale-ability to overcome limitations of SMP system.The biggest shared memory bus an all requests use to use this same memory bus. With introduction of NUMA system each NUMA nodes would not have there own memory and possibly own I/O channels.

Is there any way to get a reading, from SQL Server or perfmon or hardware vendor tools or VM tools, of how much you are crossing NUMA boundaries, and what that is costing?

The readings which should interest you is Local and Foreign memory readings. Local memory is memory of the node which process can easily access while memory allocated to any other nodes which process wants to access is foreign memory. The COST associated with foreign memory access is high so you need to monitor that.

You need to see counter SQL Server:Buffer Node object and in that you can see

1. Database pages

2. Foreign pages.

For more information you must read Growing and shrinking BPOOL under NUMA

Jonthan Kehayias has written more about NUMA