Lock Timeouts with low Lock Waits

Question

On a production SQL Server 2012 database we are getting some odd locking statistics that I don't understand.

Lock Waits/Min: 0.2
Lock Timeouts/Min: 197.4
Deadlocks/Min: 0.0

@@lock_timeout is set to -1

How can I have Lock Timeouts without having Lock Waits? I recently added some missing indexes, could that be affecting these numbers?

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 01 '12 at 11:02

It seems you are monitoring a Lock Timeouts/sec Performance Monitor counter or perhaps querying sys.dm_os_performance_counters directly. The Lock Timeouts/sec class for Profiler has the following notes in the documentation:

Lock Timeouts/sec

Most likely the vast majority of the events you are seeing are explained that way. Try monitoring Lock:Timeout (timeout > 0) instead.

Lock Timeouts with low Lock Waits

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