Knowing Tempdb - SQL Server 2012 Internals and Troubleshooting - page 225

until it equals all the other i les. This is a bad scenario if you're trying to balance the allocation
requests evenly across the i les, so you need to ensure that all the tempdb data i les are the same size.
This is illustrated in Figure 8-13.

NOTE You can learn more about how to coni gure multiple tempdb data i les in
the last major section of this chapter, “Coni guration Best Practices.”

8GB 4GB 4GB 4GB

Tempdb data files

5GB 5GB 5GB 5GB

Tempdb data files

FIGURE 8-13

To determine whether simply adding more i les can make a measurable difference to the contention
example from the previous section, you can coni gure the server to have four equally sized tempdb
data i les. It's not important for them to be on separate drives because you're not doing it to improve
I/O performance but simply to have more allocation pages.

You can modify the following the script for your own environment to coni gure the data i les, which
are all on the same disk.

ALTER DATABASE tempdb
MODIFY FILE (name=tempdev,size=512MB) ;
GO
ALTER DATABASE tempdb
ADD FILE (name=tempdev2,size=512MB,filename='D:\data\tempdev2.ndf') ;