WAITFOR

Overview

Occurs when a session executes the WAITFOR command (DELAY or TIME). This is intentional application-level waiting and is almost never a performance problem.

Key Metrics

Metric	Description
Wait Type	WAITFOR
Category	Baseline
Severity	INFO

Troubleshooting

1. Identify the source

Use the following query to identify the top queries contributing to WAITFOR waits:

SELECT TOP 10
 [Wait Type] = wait_type,
 [Wait Seconds] = wait_time_ms / 1000,
 [Wait Count] = waiting_tasks_count,
 [Avg Wait Ms] = wait_time_ms / NULLIF(waiting_tasks_count, 0)
FROM sys.dm_os_wait_stats
WHERE wait_type = 'WAITFOR'
ORDER BY wait_time_ms DESC;

2. Related diagnostics

• Review overall wait statistics using sys.dm_os_wait_stats
• Check session-level waits via sys.dm_exec_session_wait_stats
• Correlate with sys.dm_exec_requests for blocking analysis

See Also

• sys.dm_os_wait_stats (Transact-SQL)
• sys.dm_exec_session_wait_stats (Transact-SQL)
• sys.dm_os_waiting_tasks (Transact-SQL)