Constant SQL Server 80% CPU Utilization
We have a small (for now) Asp.Net MVC 5 website on a dedicated VPS. When I go to the server and fire-up task manager, I see that "SQL Server Windows NT - 64 bit" is using around 80% of CPU and 170MB of RAM and IIS is using 6% CPU and 400MB of RAM. Server Specs are:
- CPU 1.90Ghz dual core
- Memory 2GB
- Windows Server 2012
- SQL Server Express 2012
- Disk Space: 25GB, 2.35 Free.
The database is not very big. Its backup is less than 10MB.
I have tried to optimize the website as much as I could. I added caching to a lot of controllers and implemented donut caching for quite a lot of controllers. But today, even though there were only 5 users online, our search wouldn't work. I restarted the Windows on the server and it started working but I got the high CPU usage the minute server started. Interestingly when I open the SQL Server Management Studio and try to get the report for top CPU-consuming queries it says that there are no queries currently consuming any CPU!!! But at the same time I can see that SQL server is consuming a lot of CPU. How can I examine what is taking all the CPU? Below is a picture from the server:
I was/am very careful with designing and implementing the website. All the database access is through latest version of Entity Framework. I just wonder if the server's specs are low. Any help would be very much appreciated.
Update:
Here's the result of the sp_who2 stored procedure.
I would agree running SQL Profiler to spot large query durations and large write operations. Try running perfmon and spotting any potential connection leaks (reclaimed connections).