Latch Timescales

To compare old and new latch mechanisms, I found useful the following illustration. Since it is hard for us, humans, to visualize milli- and microseconds, imagine “time microscope” that zooms in timed events one million times.

Alternatively, just imagine contemporary Oracle software running on 1950th style hardware.

Such microscope will magnify the microsecond to second. One real “second” will transform to one million seconds. It takes more than 11 days. Light will travel at sonic speed. Lunar rocket will crawl like snail.

MEDIAS-2011

A week ago I returned from MEDIAS-2011 conference, which was held in Limassol (Cyprus). It was an exciting experience to speak at general Computer Science conference. This was also an opportunity to discuss topics beyond the usual scope of Oracle conferences and see non addicted to Oracle point of view.

As you may expect, my presentation was entitled “Exploring the Oracle latches”. You can download it here. The presentation contains more math and less X$ materials than usual. Also, I added several introductory slides about Oracle, its performance and tuning.

And, of course, Cyprus is a great place!

Thanks to Professor S.V. Klimenko for kindly inviting me to MEDIAS 2011 conference.
Thanks to RDTEX CEO I.G. Kunitsky for financial support.
Thanks to RDTEX Technical Support Centre Director S.P. Misiura for years of encouragement and support of my investigations.

Spin tales: Part 3. Non-standard latch classes in Oracle 9.2-11g

In version 9.2 Oracle introduced new possibilities for fine grain latch tuning. Latch can be assigned to one of eight classes. Each class can have a different spin and wait policy. In addition, exclusive and shared latches behave differently.

By default, all the latches except “process allocation latch” belong to the standard class 0. In my previous posts, I discussed how the standard class exclusive and shared latches spin and wait. Now, it is the time to explore the non-standard class latch behaviors.

Spin tales: Part 2. Shared latches in Oracle 9.2-11g

My previous experiments demonstrated that, opposite to common belief, spin count for exclusive latches in Oracle 9.2-11g cannot be tuned dynamically. The _spin_count parameter is effectively static for exclusive latches. This seems to disagree with the well-known study “Using _spin_count to reduce latch contention in 11g” by Guy Harrison. The study explored how dynamic tuning of _spin_count influenced latch waits, CPU consumption and throughput. I think that there is no contradiction. Probably Guy Harrison’s experiments have been performed with the cache buffers chains latch contention. This is the shared latch.

We already know that exclusive latch in Oracle 9.2-11g uses static spin value from x$ksllclass fixed table. This spin can be adjusted by _latch_class_0 parameter. By default, the exclusive latch spins up to twenty thousand cycles.

This post will show that shared latch in Oracle 9.2-11g is governed by _spin_count value and spins upto four thousand cycles by default.