SCDPM Online

Visiting a number of customers recently I have noticed that many were experiencing abnormally high CPU usage on their DPM servers.  All the servers were well spec'd and easily had the resources to deal with the load put on them, but still there was extremely high CPU usage being experienced.  It was particularly bad when performing any kind of administration using the DPM console on the affected server. 

After performing a number of investigative tasks which didn't help me diagnose the problem, I found that SQL was patched to SP2 on the servers experiencing this issue.  As I had very little else to try I applied SP3 to SQL and after a reboot, the server was running like a charm.  I then advised my other customers to try this and it has worked in resolving their high CPU usage in every case.

So bottom line, apply SP3 to your DPM SQL installation, it will potentially save you a lot of head scratching.