So this was an interesting one, never seen such a thing before.
I wrote a quick audit procedure to basically monitor connections to every instance in my environment by simply querying sysperfinfo. Well, for the most part the data is spot on. Except for two instances. The cntr_value in sysprocesses for counter_name = ‘user connections’ is showing about 2,000 for two instances yet sysprocesses shows no more than 30-40 at a time for these instances. I have verified that using perfmon on the server, does indeed report the same number that sysperfinfo does.
I am polling data from over 200 instances, and only these two are showing inaccurate numbers. To add to the mystery, these servers are pretty much the same. One is a virtual and one is a physical, with the exact same layout, databases, etc. The virtual was to be a proof of concept that the physical could be turned into a virtual. The physical is in use whereas the virtual is not, yet they both have this same problem in regards to sysperfinfo not being anywhere near the actual number of connections, and the number for both is extremely high.
Wasn’t able to find much of anything relevant online, so I restarted the instance and the counters in sysperfinfo went back to normal. They now match sysprocesses. I’m going to keep an eye on this to see if the problem returns, but for now, all is well.
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