>>Unclear on this end what all is running and even if the robot and the other process both need SQL server. Not enough info to offer more than basic info of what can be done to tweak Windoze machines unless you offer more detail. I interpreted "server" in the headline as the machine, not SQL server process.
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>>If both tasks bottleneck SQL server and thereby drown out one task, you will have to do some semaphoring/priotirizing those calls. Dunno what SQL server offers in that area, maybe Kevin has an idea, but probably he will also first ask for some more info from the logs ;-)
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>At midnight, I have a process which runs intensively for 12 minutes. That is a robot using the database to build Excel reports. When this one kicks in, my other application starts to crawl. I had to stop all the robots so I was able to benchmark this application without any interferences. This morning, I saw the Web site was answering some Web requests. This is a UAT Web site where there is presently low traffic so I was not expecting to be affected by that. However, even a small query of 2 seconds affected the other process. So, this is quite irritating that such a powerful database engine with very good hardware shows some latency whenever something runs in the background.
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>>There are WinAPI calls for that, and AFAIK some processes will read a .cfg file with scheduling entries, but have not verified.
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>Thanks

Sounds like an I/O problem. Perhaps you need more horses, especially as fast SSD disk solution.

Another solution might be to tweak the isolation levels. For some queries you might lower them to read uncommitted. This will not issue read locks and reduce I/O.

Walter,