SQL SERVER � What is Wait Type Parallel Backup Queue?

July 10, 2019

Pinal Dave
SQL Tips and Tricks
1 Comment
SQL SERVER - What is Wait Type Parallel Backup Queue? parallel-backup-800x671
Recently one of my blog readers contacted me and ask if I knew about wait type
parallel_backup_queue. I have often got the same question during the Comprehensive
Database Performance Health Check. My search on the internet was not giving me a
lot of details. Only official documentation which I could find was about wait
statistics related to Parallel Backup Queue is very little available online.

Occurs when serializing output produced by RESTORE HEADERONLY, RESTORE

FILELISTONLY, or RESTORE LABELONLY.

I asked him, my friend, what exact command he is running, and he informed that he
is running below.

1
RESTORE FILELISTONLY FROM DISK='F:\Backups\ProductionDB.bak'
This is matching with documentation but what is �serializing output�? He informed
that he was checking sys.dm_exec_requests DMV and filtering for the SPID which was
running this command.

Solarwinds
I asked him to check sys.sysprocesses and we found that there were two threads for
that SPID. One of them was in a suspended state with wait type
parallel_backup_queue and another was running and showing wait of BACKUPIO. I
captured process monitor to check IO and I was surprised to see that the above
command was reading the whole file in chunks. The database size was close it 1.5
TB.

So, I asked him to leave it running as it was reading the backup file. Finally, we
found that it failed with an error:

The media family on device is incorrectly formed.

This made me believe that if there is a problem with the backup media, the commands
would take a long time and we might see wait of parallel_backup_queue.

I have not been able to reproduce this in my lab even with 50 GB backup. If you
find a way, please share via comments. Or if you have some other findings of
Parallel Backup Queue, please share that as well.