I support the SQL infrastructure for a group here at my organization. I'm not directly responsible for the databases, but they require some help. They pull data on a weekly basis from an Oracle database and import or merge that data into their SQL DB. They've been complaining for a long time about how long this process takes. Sometimes it's multiple hours for a single table. Network is not a bottleneck in this case and the DB's are located on a Flash array, so the disk shouldn't be a bottleneck either.
I noticed today that they have the autogrowth setting for the database file set at 1MB. I then did a quick check on unallocated space and over half of the size of the MDF file is unallocated. The DB is 575GB's and the free space is showing just over 331GB's. The log file is maintained with hourly transaction log backups and only has 35MB's of unallocated space.
So here are my questions. Does the 1MB autogrowth size have any bearing on overall database performance after it's been grown and should I worry about shrinking it since it's more than 50% empty?