An XEvent a Day (26 of 31) – Configuring Session Options

There are 7 Session level options that can be configured in Extended Events that affect the way an Event Session operates.  These options can impact performance and should be considered when configuring an Event Session.  I have made use of a few of these periodically throughout this months blog posts, and in today’s blog post I’ll cover each of the options separately, and provide further information about their usage.  Mike Wachal from the Extended Events team at Microsoft, talked about the Session options on his blog post, Option Trading: Getting the most out of the event session options, and I’d recommend giving it a read for additional information as well.

EVENT_RETENTION_MODE

The EVENT_RETENTION_MODE option specifies how the Event Session handles Event loss when Events generate faster than they can be dispatched to the Targets.  There are three possible values for this option; ALLOW_SINGLE_EVENT_LOSS, ALLOW_MULTIPLE_EVENT_LOSS, and NO_EVENT_LOSS.  This option directly affects the possible impact that an Event Session may have on the performance of a system while the Event Session is active.  A trade off occurs between performance impact and the guarantee whether all Events are captured or not.

ALLOW_SINGLE_EVENT_LOSS

The ALLOW_SINGLE_EVENT_LOSS value is the system default for all Event Sessions where the EVENT_RETENTION_MODE is not explicitly specified as a part of the Event Session definition.  This value allows single events to be dropped and lost from the session when the memory buffers for the Event Session are full and dispatch to the Targets can not keep up with the Event generation. 

ALLOW_MULTIPLE_EVENT_LOSS

The ALLOW_MULTIPLE_EVENT_LOSS value allows an entire memory buffer containing multiple events to be dropped and lost when the memory buffers are full and the Events are generating faster than the buffers can be dispatched to the Targets.  This can minimize the performance impact on the server at the trade off that many Events could potentially be lost, with the number of Events lost depending on the size of the Events being generated, the configuration of the MAX_MEMORY session option, and the MEMORY_PARTITION_MODE session option. 

NO_EVENT_LOSS

The NO_EVENT_LOSS value guarantees that all Events that fire are captured, but at the expense of possible system performance degradation when the Event Session is active.  If the memory buffers are all full and an Event fires, the task firing the Event will wait until space is available in a memory buffer for the Event to be buffered.  This option value is not recommended by the Extended Events team at Microsoft for most Event Sessions and should be used with extreme caution and only when it is absolutely necessary that every Event be captured, even at the expense of degraded performance of the system.

MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY

The MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY option specifies the time in seconds that Events are held in a memory buffer that is not full before being dispatched to the asynchronous session Targets.  The default value if the MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY is not explicitly defined in the Session definition is 30 seconds, and the option has a minimum value of 1 second.  If a value of 0 or INFINITE is specified, the Events held in a memory buffer will not be dispatched until the memory buffer becomes full.

MAX_EVENT_SIZE

The MAX_EVENT_SIZE option specifies the maximum size in kilobytes or megabytes an individual Event can be.  The default value for this option when it is not explicitly set in the Session definition is 0KB, allowing the maximum Event size to be the size of a single memory buffer in the Event Session.  This option can be explicitly set to allow Events that are larger than a single memory buffer to be captured by the Event Session.  The minimum value for this option is 64KB.

MAX_MEMORY

The MAX_MEMORY option specifies the amount of memory in kilobytes or megabytes that is allocated to the memory buffers for the Event Session.  The value of this options is divided evenly amongst the memory buffers that are created for the Event Session based on the configuration of the MEMORY_PARTITION_MODE session option.  The MAX_MEMORY option can be used to increase the memory available for buffering Events when a large number of Events are expected to fire, minimizing Event loss due to full memory buffers.  The default value for this option is 4 megabytes (MB) or 4096 kilobytes (KB). 

Mike Wachal blogged about this option on the Extended Events blog Take it to the MAX (and beyond), and again in response to a number of questions that I sent him early on in this blog series when I was working on a large NUMA based server, Session memory – who’s this guy named Max and what’s he doing with my memory?

MEMORY_PARTITION_MODE

The MEMORY_PARTITION_MODE option specifies how the memory buffers for the Event Session are created and/or partitioned.  For servers with multiple processors and/or multiple NUMA nodes the memory buffers can become a bottleneck performance wise if multiple CPU’s are firing Events and have to wait on a memory buffer to buffer the Event information being collected.  There are three values for this option; NONE, PER_NODE, and PER_CPU. 

NONE

The NONE value specifies that a single set of memory buffers will be created for the Event Session.  In this configuration, three memory buffers are created for the Event Session, and the memory for the Event Session is divided evenly, to the nearest 64KB boundary, amongst the three memory buffers.  This is the default value for an Event Session if the MEMORY_PARTITION_MODE is not explicitly defined.

PER_NODE

The PER_NODE value specifies that a separate set of three memory buffers will be created.  In this configuration, three memory buffers are created for each NUMA node that exists for the SQL Server Instance, and the memory is divided evenly, to the nearest 64KB boundary, amongst all of the memory buffers.  

PER_CPU

The PER_CPU value specifies that a set of memory buffers is created for each CPUs/Scheduler that is assigned to the SQL Server Instance.  In this configuration, the number of memory buffers is 2.5 times the number of CPUs/Schedulers available, and the memory is divided evenly, to the nearest 64KB boundary, amongst all of the memory buffers.

STARTUP_STATE

The STARTUP_STATE option specifies whether an Event Session automatically starts in an Active state when the SQL Server Instance starts up.  There are two valid values for this option, ON and OFF, with OFF being the default.

TRACK_CAUSALITY

The TRACK_CAUSALITY option specifies whether causality tracking across multiple Events is turned ON or OFF.  The default configuration for this option is OFF.  When TRACK_CAUSALITY is turned on, an additional Action, package0.attach_activity_id, is added to each Event that fires in the Event Session.  This Action is a combination GUID and sequence number that allows related Events to be tracked for cause and effect analysis of the Events that fired in the order in which they have fired.

I should make note of the fact that in many cases, the options specified in the blog posts, may not be appropriate for a production implementation, and may have been made based on the fact that I just didn’t want to wait over multiple test cycles for Events to dispatch to the Targets.

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