Troubleshooting Latch Contention

In Oracle Database, latches are used to serialize changes on critical structures. While latches are crucial to maintain consistency, they also introduce contention points. Resolving these contention points will improve application scalability. Latch contention is a complex topic. This chapter explores the concepts behind latches and latch contention issues, and it offers a few methods to debug and resolve latch contention. Some of the most commonly occurring hot-spots of contention for latches are discussed in detail, including cache buffer chains, the shared pool, the library cache, and enqueue hash chains.