SQL Server recommended MAXDOP settings for NUMA I have an OLTP SQL Database running on SQL 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition that may be fairly busy (5000 batches/sec) in next couple of months after going live production. Looking into server configuration I have question about setting MAXDOP however now a days what I find as a regular reader of this forum general consensus is that to leave server wide MAXDOP setting to 0 for tasks that need parallel operation (e.g. index rebuild and change cost threshold of parallelism to a higher number (15 or 20 instead of default 5).

However, this server has NUMA nodes and based on these MS support articles
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/329204

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2023536

to prevent costly foreign memory access it is recommended to set MAXDOP = number of cores in the physical processor. 

This server has 2 physical processors with 16 logical (8 physical) cores on each socket. Does guideline suggested by that MS support KB is still good? 

I know everything need to be tried and tested but my goal is to set MAXDOP to the best theoretical number and adjust it if needed later on. Based on it should I set MAXDOP setting to 8?
Typically I recommend to my clients leaving the MAXDOP alone.  SQL Server is NUMA aware so it knows which NUMA node the processors are in and which NUMA node the memory is in and it'll do it's best to assign the work to a scheduler on the correct NUMA node for the data that you are looking for.

Looking into this sort of stuff also requires knowing how many NUMA nodes you have.  Is each physical processor in its own NUMA node or are they node in the same NUMA node?