Shift-Change Reporting Repeatedly Stalled
Every day at shift change, production-floor reporting queries against the ASE 16 instance would slow to a crawl for 20–30 minutes, disrupting supervisors who needed real-time throughput data.
Case Study · Sybase DBA Services
Ending Recurring Slowdowns With Tempdb & Cache Tuning
A manufacturing group's ASE 16 instance suffered unpredictable slowdowns during shift-change reporting. Named-cache reconfiguration and tempdb optimization stabilized performance for good.
0 Recurrences
In 4 months post-fix
Industry
Manufacturing group
4 Weeks
Duration
The Challenge
A Slowdown That Only Appeared Under Real Load
Tempdb Was Undersized for the Workload
The tempdb configuration had not been revisited since the original ASE install years earlier, while reporting query volume and the complexity of temp table usage had grown substantially.
A Single Default Data Cache for Everything
All databases — OLTP production data, reporting tables, and tempdb — shared the single default data cache, meaning heavy reporting scans were repeatedly evicting pages the production floor's transactional workload needed.
The Approach
Isolate the Workloads, Then Size for Reality
Every configuration change was validated against captured MDA data from the actual shift-change window before being applied to production.
Baseline Capture During Incident Window
Captured MDA metrics — tempdb space usage, cache hit ratios, and lock contention — specifically during the shift-change reporting window to see the actual behavior driving the slowdown, not a generalized average.
Named Cache Separation
Configured separate named caches for the reporting database and tempdb, isolating heavy reporting scans from the production OLTP data cache so one workload could no longer evict pages the other depended on.
Tempdb Resizing & Multi-Device Layout
Resized tempdb and spread it across multiple devices to reduce allocation contention, and adjusted its own named cache to reflect the actual temp table volume generated by shift-change reports.
Reporting Query Review
Reviewed the heaviest shift-change reporting queries for unnecessary temp table materialization, reducing tempdb pressure at the source rather than only compensating for it at the configuration level.
Watermark Alerting Added
Added tempdb space and cache hit ratio alerting at defined watermarks so any future drift toward contention would be caught proactively instead of surfacing as a repeat incident.
A Daily Disruption Eliminated in 4 Weeks
The shift-change slowdown that had recurred for years was root-caused and resolved with zero recurrences in the four months that followed — not just patched around.
~20-30 Minutes of Lost Floor Visibility Recovered Every Shift
Named cache separation and tempdb resizing restored real-time reporting for production supervisors during the exact window they depend on it most.
Root Cause Fixed Once, Not Firefought Repeatedly
Diagnosing cache and tempdb configuration as the structural cause, rather than treating each incident separately, cut the ongoing engineering time typically spent re-investigating the same symptom.
Proactive Watermark Alerting Replaces Reactive Firefighting
Tempdb and cache hit ratio alerts now catch configuration drift before it becomes a repeat incident, an estimated substantial reduction in future unplanned DBA response time.
The Impact
The Business Impact
- Daily shift-change reporting slowdown eliminated — zero recurrences in the four months following the change
- Separate named caches isolating reporting, tempdb, and OLTP workloads from one another
- Tempdb resized and spread across multiple devices to reduce allocation contention
- Heaviest reporting queries rewritten to reduce unnecessary temp table usage
- Tempdb and cache hit ratio watermark alerting added for early warning of future drift
- Production-floor supervisors regained reliable real-time reporting during shift change
"It had become normal to just wait out the slow patch every shift change. Once we understood it was cache contention and not 'the database being slow,' the fix was straightforward." — OptiSol Sybase DBA Lead
