Hello there!

but is it possible that this is simply due to the normal load on the machine?
- Probably the case.

The point is it also depends on the type of process your SQL is doing.

The problem is that sqlserv.exe process is consuming upto 90% of the cpu resources.
In our company, I remember the time when we had the same load problem in which we run MS SQL 2000 in our MS Win 2K server and it actually eats up the resources of the RAM, the box is really extremely slow and eats up the CPU process entirely. At the first place, we suspect it is memory issues and we had upgraded to 1GB of RAM, but still did not solved the problem. We used PIII boxes normally and it has no problem whatsoever until the programmers did some changes with the BACKEND SOFTWARE supporting the SQL server. We had found out that SQL is not releasing such MEMORY that it is using in some of its process. Some problem with the SQL script that was setup by the programmers and the DB admin. Some sort of dumped temporary records are increasing which should be clean-up by the program but unfortunately it stays in the DB and it made the SQL Server very busy. It might be the same case since your SQL eats up the resources.

Even so, we also run and publish reports (Crystal Report) on the web retrieved by our clients but it should not actually affect the SQL Process since the Crystal Report will only get records from the SQL DB (in our case, it has no implication on the SQL process, it could be different with others).

Hope it could relate to your situation.

-GONE