CHKPT is recorded at instance startup while the background checkpoint process initialises and waits for the signal that it can start. It happens once per instance start, and that is the whole story: one wait, at boot, ever.
Do not confuse it with CHECKPOINT_QUEUE (the checkpoint process idling between requests, continuous) or SLEEP_BPOOL_FLUSH (checkpoint throttling its writes); the three are different corners of the same subsystem.
Is It a Problem?
No. Expect exactly one occurrence per startup with whatever duration the boot sequence produced. Its only conceivable signal value is forensic: more than one occurrence since startup would mean the background checkpoint process crashed and restarted, which is effectively unheard of.
It sits on the benign filter list, and its wait time is a curiosity, not a metric.
Common Causes
- The instance starting; the checkpoint thread waits for its go signal during boot.
What To Do
- Filter it out of wait analysis; our
Get-WaitStatisticsscript excludes it by default. - Nothing else. There is no configuration, workload, or tuning connected to it.
How To See It
Rank waits with Get-WaitStatistics, where it is filtered. In raw output, a single small entry after each restart is all you will ever see.
Part of the SQL Server Wait Types Library.
Related deep dive: IO_COMPLETION Wait Type.
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