What interval does SQL Server Profiler's "duration" refer to?

I've been having strange things on a production server. Clients (all on the local LAN) are getting *timeout* errors on queries that should have no problem at all. - it happens during times of low CPU usage ( What does **duration** mean? Of course that's trivial to answer: > duration is **EndTime - StartTime**. Which means I'm actually asking (without being pedantic): - during what stage of query execution is **StartTime** timestamp recorded? - during what stage of query execution is **EndTime** timestamp recorded? If I can get an answer to that, my question next will be to find all events that go in between. Bonus Chatter ------------------ It might be helpful to see a timeline of all events during select getdate(): 1. Acquire Shared Database lock 2. Release Shared Database lock 3. SP:CacheMiss 4. SQL:BatchStarting 5. SQL:StmtStarting 6. SQL:StmtCompleted 7. SQL:BatchCompleted Of course, this is just *one*, non-repeatable, random, example of queries that take an inordinate amount of time to run. Bonus Reading ----------- - https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/47988/sql-server-insert-randomly-takes-10-seconds-to-complete *(closed by grumpy people)* - [SQL Profiler CPU / duration units](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/976628/sql-profiler-cpu-duration-units) *(it's 17,000 ms)* - View and Analyze Traces with SQL Server Profiler