SQL Server 2008 R2 SQL Server has encountered x occurrence(s) of I/O requests taking longer than 15 seconds to complete on file ' When I alter or create a stored procedure directly on production or QA database, after a few seconds I start experience timeouts and application becomes unavailable.

Log files shows this error:


  SQL Server has encountered 3 occurrence(s) of I/O requests taking
  longer than 15 seconds to complete on file [C:\Program Files\Microsoft
  SQL Server\MSSQL10_50.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\QA_Database.ldf] in
  database [QA_Database] (9).  The OS file handle is 0x0000000000000568.
  The offset of the latest long I/O is: 0x0000002821a200


We have SQL Server 2008 R2 installed, including latest Service Pack.

I tried to reproduce it on QA, but to no avail. I have no clue what it could be.

Stored procedure execution time is around 1 second and it runs occasionally. It returns just few records. It happened with 2 different stored procedures and I think that changing, not running, a stored procedure triggered something that caused the issue.
Once I deleted it, issue was gone immediately.
Just a hunch... is that ldf growing when you get this error? I seen this error a few times and always been that someone set the growthrate in too big steps for the io subsystem to handle at same time as normal io within 15 seconds. Go and see if it happens to bet set to 10% and how big a step that would be. If it is GBs you might want to set it to a smaller size to grow and also in MB instead of percent.

Who knows I might get lucky on this one ;-)