Shared Pool Latch handling improvement in 8.1.6

We have had very terrible shared pool latch contentions when running 8.1.5. The cause was that SQLs were not shared.

After moving to 8.1.7 the problem gets "dramatically" improved without much changing on the apps side - although we did fix some bind variables.

I have noticed that our Shared pool fragmentation is as bad as it used to be, but latch contentions are no where to be seen under 8.1.7

A white paper I recently read says Oracle made some improvements on shared pool latch handling in 8.1.6 where free lists are kept in several buckets instead in one long list as it has been since 7. This dramatically cuts down free space search time and therefore reduces shared pool latch holding time. In 9i, there are further improvement that Oracle uses bitmap index to hold free list.

My question is, does anybody have the similar experience on this improvement ? I just want to confirm what I read and experienced against other people's experience. Also, what about 9i ?

If you have the same experience, whats your estimated % of improvement ?

Thanks in advance.

-Bass Chorng Received on Wed Jan 16 2002 - 18:47:48 CST