Disable unnecessary SQL Server instances and services

Why should you care about services that are not needed?

You may be wasting your precious resources on unused services.

It would be best if you prioritize your more critical SQL Instance to use more resources and do not allow less important ones to take all of them.

How can I list all the SQL Server instances and services?

  1. Click Start and search for “configuration”.
  2. Open “SQL Server configuration manager” and choose “SQL Server Services”.
Figure 1 – SQL Server configuration manager.

Also, you can list all instances installed using the T-SQL code below.

  1. EXEC master.sys.xp_regread @rootkey = 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
  2. @key = 'SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server',
  3. @value_name = 'InstalledInstances'

How can you fix them?

  1. Disable the SQL instances and services that are not used.
  2. Adjust the max memory, the threshold to parallelism, and max DOP settings for all instances appropriately.

By the way, this check is a part of our SQL Server Health Check.

More information

Microsoft – Start, stop, pause, resume, restart SQL Server services.

Mark Varnas

Mark Varnas

Hey I'm Mark, one of the guys behind Red9. I make a living performance tuning SQL Servers and making them more stable. I channel my SQL into our SQL Managed Services, SQL Consulting and our internal database products.

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