 <blockquote> <p>I think this is a problem and I think if I set it to 1GB it will increase the performance and capability, is that right ?</p> </blockquote> <p>It will mean the DB will need to stop less often to grow, certainly, and data inserts will occur more frequently. It will reduce the impact of data file growth. However, <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315512" rel="nofollow">Microsoft says that autogrow is not intended to manage planned file growth</a>. It's intended to handle <em>unexpected</em> growth. Autogrow is just not designed to work the way you're using it. The design intent is that you know how much data you will be storing and you have planned accordingly and already correctly sized your DB.</p> <p>This might be somewhat unrealistic given your application, however. If your system is designed to hold all data ever collected indefinitely, your capacity planning is a bit difficult.</p> <p>This is why it's common practice to differentiate operational data from warehoused data. Your operational data is stored in one database, which you can predict the growth for within a given time frame (usually 1 or more years). After a period of time, older data is archived to data warehouses, which may be very large or single year containers, but since data is inserted here rarely, you know what your capacity is going to be.</p> <p>If I were you, I would pick a time frame to plan for. Say one month, quarter, or year. Every period of time, manually grow your database large enough so that the free space is what you expect to need to accommodate the coming period. Don't forget to include index space! Use the SSMS reports to help your estimates!</p> <p>This means you can do your growth during off-hours or maintenance windows and your application is never waiting on the DB to finish growing. I would then set autogrowth to be about 5% of the free space you're planning for. If you underestimate, you'll get an idea by how much when you look at your shrink/grow logs. You can then increase for next month. Eventually, you'll learn what you need on a monthly basis. Just make sure to grow based on <em>free space</em> in the database and not absolute file size.</p>