SQL Server Contention Indicators

on February 11, 2013


Locks are used to maintain the ACID properties of a transaction, but latches are used to provide consistency over a memory operation. A spinlock should be considered as similar, in that a resource is needed for a particular operation, but is not available. Therefore, when you see higher than normal wait stats associated with latches and spinlocks, you may need to investigate further.
However, only seeing higher than normal wait stats does not in and of itself indicate a contention problem. It is perfectly reasonable to expect that if your system is busier now than when you took your benchmark, your wait stats would be higher.
You should look for the proportion of wait stats compared to others, and compare this to the throughput being achieved. You might also want to consider how many transactions per second you’re managing to achieve as you increase the load, and the effect of extra processors.
One strong indicator of latch contention can be seen when the proportion of latch-related wait stats increases unreasonably as your throughput increases.
For spinlock contention, a strong indicator is the number of spins per collision increasing, typically combined with increased CPU. Spinning is an activity that requires CPU effort, so if spinning increases disproportionally, CPU is likely to do the same. CPU may go up simply because of a busier system, but if the transactions per second counters are leveling off while CPU is increasing, then this would suggest the CPU is being used for something else — such as spinning.

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