First try to understand more details about the performance issues. Normally performance problems are reported by Developers or Client as per feedback from end users or some monitoring tools reporting specific performance issue on the server. – Ask Developers or Client questions to understand what they mean by performance problems and gather mode details to pinpoint issue to a specific application or a specific functionality of the application. – Troubleshooting approach will differ for general performance problems affecting whole application or more specific problem like slowness with specific Stored Procedure or Query. Next steps are specific to general performance troubleshooting. – Check the overall hardware resource usage like, CPU usage on the server, Memory usage on the server, I/O usage on the server and Network usage to see if there is any spikes in any of their usage. If yes, then drill further down in that direction, if every thing looks normal, then will proceed with checking at SQL Server level. – Check SQL Server errorlogs and eventlogs for any errors. – Check for any blocking or heavy locking or high number of suspended sessions. – Check wait stats to see the top waits. – Checking if there are regular maintenance on the SQL Server like rebuilding indexes and update of statistics. If not, then will implement those which will significantly improve the performance. – Will run DMV’s to identify Top Duration, Top CPU, Top Read or Write intensive queries and try to tune them by creating appropriate indexes or report them to developer suggesting to re-write those queries. – Checking for SQL configuration settings like, MaxDoP, SQL Max Server Memory, Lock Pages in Memory, Instant File Initialization, Auto-Growth settings, etc.