Waitopedia is a comprehensive resource of information about SQL Server waits.

The description shown below is the top answer as voted by the Spotlight community.

The charts are based on 2.1 TB of data collected from 4207 instances uploaded by 323 Spotlight users over an 8 week period.

XE_TIMER_EVENT

Category: Idle
SQL Server versions: 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017

This is an idle wait and so it can be safely ignored.

What is XE_TIMER_EVENT?

1 Answer

 

Used to indicate a background task is waiting for "expired" timers for internal Xevent engine work.

Can usually be safely ignored – Alec Wood 3100 days ago
Very rare

This wait never occurs for most instances

For each of 4207 instances, we ranked XE_TIMER_EVENT on how frequent it is compared to all other recent waits. The chart shows the total of all rankings.

Prevalence of XE_TIMER_EVENT across the Spotlight Population

For 24 % of hours with this wait, average wait time is around 2.2 seconds

For each instance, we found all the recent hours when it had a XE_TIMER_EVENT wait. We found the average latency for each of those hours.

1152 instances contributed data to this chart

Latency Distribution of XE_TIMER_EVENT across the Spotlight Population