DW Mirroring Refresh Latency Increasing Over Time — Is This Expected in Production Workloads?

Hi SavioFerraz,

Yes — this behavior can occur in production workloads. DW Mirroring latency is not fixed and will increase based on ingestion pressure and resource availability. As transaction volume grows during peak hours, the mirroring pipeline must process a larger backlog of CDC logs, which leads to the kind of 20–45 second delays you’re seeing.

A few factors commonly drive rising latency:

• Higher transaction throughput on source database (more commit events to sync)
• Batch size growth in the underlying capture/replication process
• Fabric capacity pressure, especially if Warehouse resources are shared
• Historical backlog of CDC changes that were not fully caught up off-hours
• Complex workloads like frequent index rebuilds, blocking, or large bulk loads

Recommended monitoring

Enable and track:

• Warehouse Utilization metrics
• Mirror refresh latency trend
• Source DB log flush waits

This will help correlate latency spikes with capacity pressure or workload bursts.

Best regards!

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Hi SavioFerraz 

It’s not expected for mirror latency to jump from 2–3 seconds to 20–45 seconds. This usually means the source Change Tracking or the Fabric mirror compute is falling behind.

A few things to check that typically stabilize high-transaction workloads:

• Verify the source SQL isn’t hitting CT cleanup, log write pressure, or blocking.
• Check Fabric capacity load during business hours,mirrors slow down when capacity is saturated.
• Consider increasing the mirror compute tier if delta volume has grown.

When CT is healthy and capacity isn’t overloaded, mirror latency stays in single-digit seconds. If all looks normal, opening a support ticket is recommended.

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Best regards 

Nabha Ahmed