16. Dealing with Latch and Mutex Contention

Contention is the proverbial bottleneck: when multiple database sessions compete for limited or serialized resources, the amount of work that can be done by the database is constrained. Some forms of contention are the result of programming practices: in particular, contention for locks is usually a consequence of application design. By comparison, latches and mutexes are internal Oracle mechanisms and contention for latches can be harder to diagnose and resolve.

In this chapter, we see how latches and mutexes work and why they are a necessary part of the Oracle architecture. We then discuss how to diagnose the root causes of latch and mutex contention and explore remedies to common contention scenarios. ...

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