sp_setapprole taking 100 - 200 ms SQL Server 2008 SP1 here.

We have a machine where sp_setapprole calls take more than 100ms and they are done many times per user operation on an application.

The developer says that in his setup, sp_setapprole calls take less than 1ms. The machine specs are comparable (I have 12GB RAM, 6 cores, he has 16GB and 8 cores).

This problem makes the application performance to be unacceptable.

So, two actual questions:

1.- What are possible causes (and solutions) of slow sp_setapprole?

2.- How would you debug the problem?
I used HDTune to test the disks and they had an abysmal 10MB/s read speed. Diagnostics show a faulty RAID controller.