Just for fun, I enabled mutexes, and the execution rate reached only around 710 exec/sec! While Figures 7-11 and 7-12 clearly show mutexes provide significant benefit when intense cursor pinning is required, when building cursors is an issue (a lot of hard parsing), having plenty of latches can provide increased performance over mutexes. With that said, this kind of latch and mutex comparison is highly load and Oracle release dependent. So I am not making the statement that latches will always beat mutexes during intense hard parsing.

When mutexes are available, they are enabled. They can be disabled by setting the instance parameter _kks_use_mutex_pin to false. If your system is experiencing a deep mutex problem, Oracle support may advise you to turn off mutexes until a patch or two has been applied.

Most Oracle sites will never experience mutex contention and if they do, the stress will probably be related to pinning a cursor in either shared or exclusive mode.