Find out what queries are causing the biggest amount of network traffic

On a production SQL server I am seeing intermittent enormous spikes in data traffic. Up to 200Mbit/s which is causing NETWORK IO waits which in turn cause query timeouts. How can I find out what queries are returning big result sets?

You can find this from the DMVs:

SELECT session_id, num_writes, st.text AS statement_text
FROM sys.dm_exec_connections AS ec
CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(ec.most_recent_sql_handle) AS st
ORDER BY num_writes DESC

Unlike tracing this should be perfectly safe to run on a Production server.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#756, answer score: 17