It was a long and painful struggle. When the wait interface was first available, no one knew about it, so convincing people it was valuable was in direct opposition to the established Oracle performance analysis community. Historically, going against a scientific establishment can mean you are publicly discredited and potentially searching for a new job. But after many battles and unfortunate personal attacks, the wait interface prevailed. However, the wait event community has kept pushing so hard that, in some cases, they have misrepresented the true performance situation, bringing into question some performance analyses based on wait event information. This section highlights three of the most common wait event myths. This is important, because as performance firefighters, we need to be aware of the wait interface limitations so we don't misdiagnose.

Decreasing wait time usually does improve performance, but not always. First, a user does not feel only wait time, but wait time plus service time. Second, through cyclical performance optimization cycles, our goal is to reduce response time-again, not wait time or service time, but their combination.

I find the mental snare we fall prey to is due to our years of running experiments and tests. When running an experiment, we try to change a single parameter so we can observe the impact of changing that specific parameter. So if we look at the simple response-time equation of response time equals service time plus queue time, we think if we reduce queue time, then obviously response time will also decrease. But the hidden myth and assumption is that when queue time decreases, the service time will remain the same. This is completely false. Oracle is not so polite. If we alter the performance situation by focusing on changing the queue time, we may inadvertently also cause a service time change. This is why when basing an Oracle performance analysis (even when using the OraPub 3-circle methodology) on a wait event report, the resulting diagnosis can be incorrect and misguided.