Environment

-> Application team advised that Read-Only queries are executing indefinitely on secondary database that is part of Always On Availability group.

-> I tried below query to check for blocking and could see that a system session is blocking the select queries,

select * from sysprocesses where blocked<>0

-> I tried a simple select query as below on the secondary server and had the same symptoms where in the select query was running indefinitely,

select top 1 * from [Table] 

-> My session was 73 and I tried below query specifically to check what it is waiting on,

select spid,blocked,waittype, waittime,lastwaittype,dbid,waitresource from sysprocesses where blocked<>0
go
select spid,blocked,waittype, waittime,lastwaittype,dbid,waitresource from sysprocesses where spid=73

-> Select queries are blocked by Session 84. Checked what is session id 84,

-> Seems like a system session. Tried below query,

select session_id, wait_type,db_name(database_id),command from sys.dm_exec_requests where session_id = 84

-> Session ID 84 is a system thread that is leveraged for REDO operation on secondary also known as “DB STARTUP”.

-> Checked on the Primary replica to see if there are any huge write operations on object [Table].

-> I could see an alter index command on the same object [Table] on primary replica.

-> The redo thread on Secondary replica acquires schema modification (Sch-M) locks on the secondary database to make any DDL changes that are performed on primary replica. On the secondary replica, the read-only queries acquire schema stability (Sch-S) locks to process the query. In our case the select queries were not able to acquire schema stability (Sch-S) locks as the REDO thread has already acquired schema modification (Sch-M) locks and this is the reason why we were experiencing blocking.

-> In the meantime, Alter Index command completed on the primary replica and we were able to execute select queries without any issues after that.

Thank You,
Vivek Janakiraman

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