Snowflake Warehouse Spilling to Remote Storage
Queries are spilling out of memory to remote storage, which is far slower and stretches runtime, and therefore cost, well beyond the compute itself.
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Snowflake
Found, explained, handed over.
Where the estate departs from your policies, frameworks and tagging rules.
Detect
ZopNight checks this automatically across Snowflake, with read-only access to the account.
Explain
Every finding says exactly what to change: Resize the warehouse that is spilling to remote storage.
Fix
The finding opens with the fix already written out, step by step, so it is one ticket, not an investigation.
- Applies to
- Snowflake Warehouse on Snowflake
- The fix, by hand
- Open Snowsight → Admin → Warehouses → the resource and review QUERY_HISTORY.BYTES_SPILLED_TO_REMOTE_STORAGE for the heavy queries.
- Significant, recurring remote spill means the warehouse is undersized. The working set doesn't fit in memory/local disk.
- Size up one step (e.g., MEDIUM → LARGE): ALTER WAREHOUSE the resource SET WAREHOUSE_SIZE = '‹next_larger›';.
- Re-check remote-spill bytes over the next 7 days. A single step often eliminates the spill and finishes the queries faster (net-cheaper despite the higher per-hour rate).
- If only a few queries spill, consider splitting them onto a dedicated warehouse instead of sizing up the whole one.
These are the steps the finding carries in the product.
- Category
- Governance. Missing tags and labels that break cost attribution, such as no environment, team or cost-centre value.
- Where it appears
- The Compliance tab of Recommendations, with every affected resource listed.
- Rule ID
RC-2106- Full reference
Related checks
See the governance findings in your account.
Connect a read-only role and the first pass runs on your own estate. This check, and the rest of the catalogue, with it.
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- $30M+annualised cloud spend under management
- 550K+resources tracked since launch
- 20-60%off the bill in the first month
- SOC 2Type II report, plus ISO 27001
Figures published on zop.dev.