Detecting and resolving Oracle latch and mutex contention is straightforward. However, I do not mean to imply that it's simple. As you'll see, you not only must understand how Oracle uses latching and mutexes, but also the underlying memory structures. And this means you must learn about Oracle internals. I've distilled this process to eight key steps:

* Understand the general latch and mutex algorithms. This is what this chapter is all about. If you don't understand the fundamentals of serialization, your solutions are pretty much guesses-you honestly don't know if they will help improve performance.

* Detect significant latch and mutex contention. Every production Oracle system contains latch and mutex contention. If this were not the case, Oracle would be out of business, and nonconcurrency control products would be used instead. The issue is not whether contention exists; it's whether contention is a performance problem. As you'll see, Oracle's wait interface tells us if there is enough serialization to prompt us to act.