Database Animations: Why Higher Maxdop Equals More TempDB Spills

Setting Max Degree of Parallelism (MAXDOP) too high can increase the likelihood of TempDB spills. When a query runs single-threaded, its full memory grant goes to one core, but when it goes parallel, that same grant is divided evenly across all cores involved. This means a higher MAXDOP raises the chance that one or a few threads experience parallelism skew and run out of memory, spilling to disk in TempDB - a problem made worse for queries affected by parameter sniffing. DBAs are advised to tune both Cost Threshold for Parallelism and MAXDOP together, while developers are pointed to sp_BlitzCache with @SortOrder = 'spills' to find and fix queries that are spilling.

Source: https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2026/08/database-animations-why-higher-maxdop-equals-more-tempdb-spills. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.