Recently, I came across a performance issue in my SharePoint 2013 development environment (RTM) with SQL Server 2012 causing every page to take about 15 seconds to load.

My SharePoint 2013 development environment has all the service applications deployed in line under the hood, with more than enough CPU and memory available, despite this the issue of 15 seconds page load still remained.

Many areas of SharePoint 2013 can be enhanced to gain performance improvements, but my issue was specifically related to a SharePoint timer job “Database Performance Metric Provider”. After some quick research, I found that this timer job is not even listed on TechNet Timer job reference (SharePoint 2013) and should not be confused with the“Performance Metric Provider” Timer Job – this is different!

Having checked the SQL Server error logs, I found the message “Using ‘dbghelp.dll’ version ‘4.0.5’” being logged about 5-6 times a minute – flooding SQL error logs and keeping SQL Server very busy!

Furthermore, this is a known issue and a workaround is addressed in forums, but its unconfirmed if this is fixed with cumulative updates or with the March 2013 public update.

As a temporary resolution, I disabled Database Performance Metric Timer Job followed by restarting SharePoint services, my page loads reduced from 15 seconds down to about 2-3 seconds! Additionally the SQL error log messages as described above disappeared – nice!

I’d love to know if anyone have come across this issue and please leave comment if you have any additional info about the workaround above.

Hope this helps!
Chirag (@techChirag)

This post first appeared here: http://blog.pointbeyond.com/2013/06/20/database-performance-metric-provider-sharepoint-2013-timer-job-causing-15-seconds-page-load/