The housekeeper task provides important functionalities:
The housekeeper consists of three tasks: housekeeper wash, housekeeper garbage collection, and housekeeper chores. sp_who recognizes all three tasks, as the following output shows:
fid spid status loginame origname hostname blk_sp id dbname cmd block_xloid ---- ----- ---------- ---------- --------- ---------- ------ ------- --------- ------------- ------------- 0 5 sleeping henry NULL luv2work 0 master tempdb select 0 0 6 sleeping joe NULL NULL 0 master tempdb HK GC 0 0 7 sleeping NULL NULL NULL 0 master tempdb HK CHORES 0 (11 rows affected, return status = 0)
The general automatic restart of housekeeper-related system tasks: you need not restart the server if these system tasks quit unexpectedly.
A system administrator can change all housekeeper task priorities.
sp_showpsexe, as well as sp_who, recognizes all three housekeeper names.
For more information about sp_who and sp_showpsexe, see the Reference Manual: Procedures.