Network Packet Sent

Number of times a task went into a send sleep state while waiting for the network to send each packet to the client. The network model determines that there can be only one outstanding packet per connection at any point in time. A task can send a network packet without posting a send request to the network IO task, avoiding a task context switch.

If there is a lot of data to send, and the task is sending many small packets (512 bytes per packet), the task could end up sleeping a number of times. The data packet size is configurable, and different clients can request different packet sizes. When a query completes, this action is included in the Network Packet Send column.

See Chapter 2, “Networks and Performance,” in Performance and Tuning Series: Basics for more information about network packets.

If “Network Packet Sent” is a major cause of task switching, see “Network I/O Management”.