At certain times, Adaptive Server increases the priority of some tasks, especially if they are holding an important resource or have had to wait for a resource. In addition, logical process management allows you to assign priorities to logins, procedures, or applications using sp_bindexeclass and related system procedures.
See Chapter 5, “Distributing Engine Resources,” for more information on performance tuning and task priorities.
Each task has a priority assigned to it; the priority can change over the life of the task. When an engine looks for a task to run, it first scans its own high-priority queue and then the high-priority global run queue.
If there are no high-priority tasks, it looks for tasks at medium priority, then at low priority. If it finds no tasks to run on its own run queues or the global run queues, it can examine the run queues for another engine, and steal a task from another engine. This combination of priorities, local and global queues, and the ability to move tasks between engines when workload is uneven provides load balancing.
Tasks in the global or engine run queues are all in a runnable state. Output from sp_who lists tasks as “runnable” when the task is in any run queue.
