New whitepapers on latches and spinlocks published

Over the last few months I’ve been blogging occasionally about some pretty deep performance tuning topics, namely latches and spinlocks (see my blog categories Wait Stats, Latches, and Spinlocks).

Ewan Fairweather and Mike Ruthruff of the SQLCAT team have written some really excellent whitepapers on interpreting and dealing with latch and spinlock issues, which I helped tech review, and they’ve now been published.

I strongly recommend reading these whitepapers if you want to improve your perf tuning skills beyond looking at wait statistics.

You can get them at:

Enjoy!

4 thoughts on “New whitepapers on latches and spinlocks published

  1. Thanks very much for the links; they gave me a good kick in the right direction. I am now starting to realise that my understanding of locking has been clouded by not knowing enough about latches, and that latching is a fascinating area in itself.

    I guess once you are in a position where detailed spinlock analysis is a relevant option though, you’re probably running the kind of system where "standard temperature and pressure" assumptions no longer apply. But being given a little bit of insight into SQL Server spinlock design goes a long way towards bridging the gap between Delaney and Russinovich :-)

  2. WOW…

    Just when i needed a whitepaper to figure out why i have LOCK_HASH contention :)

    Thx for the links !

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