This does bring up an interesting point though. Latch contention can be the result of time spent acquiring the latch, not only time holding the latch. It is sad indeed when significant resources are used to simply acquire the latch and not actually do the database work we desire.

I suspect many of you are now anxious to see what the situation is on your system. The script in Figure 6-10 will produce the raw numbers you need. Because the query is against x$ performance tables, you'll need to be connected as sysdba. The instance parameters are fairly self-explanatory, but are detailed in Table 6-2.

Figure 6-10. The OSM ipcbc.sql report shows the CBC-related instance parameters. This script output was the source of the data in Table 6-1.