It’s been a while since I came across an interesting and complex case. However, yesterday on an OTN forum thread I saw a case which was interesting by its simplicity. Even though it’s almost trivial on the technical level, it’s very useful to highlight typical tuning “rookie mistakes” (I can remember quite a few cases from not so long ago, when I did similar mistakes, too).

The author posts a question about “library cache: mutex X” events that are ruining performance of his 2-node RAC cluster. The original post doesn’t contain any specifics except for CPU utilization percentage on both nodes.

Within a few hours, a few replies appear, most of them either trying to shed light on this particular wait event or sharing similar experiences. I asked the original poster to provide key sections of an AWR report (workload profile, top events, database/host CPU, top SQL), which he soon did:

Continue reading “AWR report case study: stating the obvious” →