This section provides information to help you analyze how dirty reads (isolation level 0 reads) affect the system.
“Page Requests” reports the average number of pages that were requested at isolation level 0. The “% of total” column reports the percentage of dirty reads with respect to the total number of page reads.
Dirty read page requests incur high overhead if they lead to many dirty read restarts.
“Re-Starts” reports the number of dirty read restarts that took place. This category is reported only for the server as a whole, and not for individual caches. sp_sysmon does not print output for this category if there were no “Dirty Read Page Requests,” as in the sample output.
A dirty read restart occurs when a dirty read is active on a page and another process makes changes to the page that cause the page to be deallocated. The scan for the level 0 must be restarted.
The “% of total” output is the percentage of dirty read restarts done with isolation level 0 as a percentage of the total number of page reads.
If these values are high, you might take steps to reduce them through application modifications because overhead associated with dirty reads and resulting restarts is very expensive. Most applications should avoid restarts because of the large overhead it incurs.
