Allpages-locked heap tables that have large amounts of concurrent insert activity will benefit from partitioning. Insert rates must be very high before significant blocking takes place on data-only-locked tables. If you are not sure whether the tables in your database system might benefit from partitioning:
Use sp_sysmon to look for last page locks on heap tables.
See “Lock management” on page 73 in the Performance and Tuning: Monitoring and Analyzing for Performance book.
Use sp_object_stats to report on lock contention.
See “Identifying tables where concurrency is a problem” on page 88 in the Performance and Tuning: Locking book.
