Question: Is the DIRTY_PAGE_POLL wait type something to worry about? Since I’ve upgraded to SQL Server 2012 , I’ve noticed the DIRTY_PAGE_POLL consistently appearing at the top of the wait types.

Answer:  The DIRTY_PAGE_POLL wait type is related to the Indirect Checkpoint feature.  One of the Indirect Checkpoint benefits is to reduce IO spiking that is checkpoint-related  by writing dirty pages continually to disk in the background.

By default, Indirect Checkpoint is not turned on , and requires an ALTER DATABASE statement to enable.

The interesting aspect of DIRTY_PAGE_POLL wait type , is it still appears as a wait type, even though Indirect Checkpoint is not enabled, as the background thread  is waiting to poll for dirty pages.

In reporting the top wait types on a database server, I don’t include DIRTY_PAGE_POLL as it changes the top waits report without giving me a better understanding of SQL Server performance.

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