Response Buffer Size governs how many rows are returned from the Advanced SQL Engine back to a client in one Response. For example, roughly about 81 rows will fit into one Response when the row size is 100 bytes and the Response Buffer size is set to 8192 bytes. In this example a larger Response Buffer Size might improve performance as the number of roundtrips between the Client and the SQL Engine is reduced. You should consider the network physical characteristics and application resource utilization when fine tuning the Response Buffer Size. For example, you might consider tuning for application resource utilization (memory) when network latency is low and application is executing high number of tactical queries.

Usually a value between 65000 and 128000 results in best performance even though Teradata Database V2R6.0 supports a 1MB Response Buffer and the SQL Engine version 16.0 supports a 7MB Response Buffer. Response Buffer Size is a connection level property and applies to all commands executed against the connection. Therefore every command will allocate the specified Response-Buffer-Size bytes of memory. In application server scenario there are multiple connection and multiple commands executing simultaneously within the same process. Therefore overall process memory utilization is affected by the Response Buffer Size.

The .NET Data Provider for Teradata normally uses double buffering in order to improve performance. This does however mean that it will use twice as much memory as you may expect for its response buffers.