When an audited event occurs, an audit record first goes to the in-memory audit queue. The record remains in memory until the audit process writes it to the audit trail. You can configure the size of the audit queue with the audit queue size parameter of sp_configure.
Before you configure the size of the audit queue, consider the trade-off between the risk of losing records in the queue if the system crashes and the loss of performance when the queue is full. As long as an audit record is in the queue, it can be lost if the system crashes. However, if the queue repeatedly becomes full, overall system performance is affected. If the audit queue is full when a user process tries to generate an audit record, the process sleeps until space in the queue becomes available.
Because audit records are not written directly to the
audit trail, you cannot count on an audit record’s being
stored immediately in the current audit table.
