Operating system vendors try to take a single process and break it up into multiple smaller processes so performance is not constrained to a single process. In effect, they are trying to transform the situation from diagram B in Figure 3-1 to diagram A, in the hopes of increasing performance. And I'm sure the CPU vendors themselves are highly involved in reducing serialization.

My point is that everyone gets involved in reducing serialization and maximizing parallelization. It's not only a technical issue, but can also be a business issue.

However, there are times when all the time, money, creative thinking, and technical prowess come to a grinding serialization slowdown. In the Oracle world, this can occur when accessing memory. When a process wants to access Oracle memory structures, Oracle must ensure complete serialization control. It may be able to parallelize if multiple processes want to look at a memory structure, but it still must have full control. Memory serialization control is what latching and mutexes are all about, and why this chapter is so important to Oracle performance firefighting.