MaxDOP

When administrating a SQL Server instance with multiple CPU cores and heavy workload, it’s common to see SQL Server creating and using execution plans with parallelism. The instance configuration “cost threshold for parallelism” is what determines for SQL Server the minimum sub-tree cost before it starts considering to create a parallelism plan. The default “out-of-the-box” value of this configuration is 5.

However, in some cases, we would want to increase the default configuration of “cost threshold for parallelism” to something higher than the Microsoft default of 5, thus decreasing the frequency in which SQL Server creates parallelism plans.