Resolving HW enqueue contention

Recently, I had few email exchanges about HW enqueue contention in oracle-l list and offline. There were few interesting observations emerged from test cases created during that discussion.

HW enqueue

When a session needs access to a resource, it requests a lock on that resource in a specific mode. Internally, lock and resource structures are used to control access to a resource. Enqueues, as name suggests, have First In First Out queueing mechanism. You can find more information about internals of locks in my paper [printed in 2001 ]Internals of locks

Segments have High Water Mark (HWM) indicating that blocks below that HWM have been formatted. New tables or truncated tables [ that is truncated without reuse storage clause ], have HWM value set to segment header block. Meaning, there are zero blocks below HWM. As new rows inserted or existing rows updated (increasing row length), more blocks are added to the free lists and HWM bumped up to reflect these new blocks. HW enqueues are acquired in Exclusive mode before updating HWM and essentially HW enqueues operate as a serializing mechanism for HWM updates.

In non-ASSM tablespaces, HWM is bumped up by 5 blocks at a time ( Actually, undocumented parameter _bump_highwater_mark_count controls this behavior and defaults to 5). Heavy inserts in to a table can result in increased HWM activity leading to HW enqueue contention. This issue is prevalent if the table has LOB columns or if the row length is big.

Measuring HW enqueue contention

We will use few test cases to see how underlying extent size and table structures are affecting HW enqueue contention. But, before we need to find a way to measure total number of gets on HW enqueue. If total number of gets on HW enqueue is reduced, enqueue contention can be relieved.

Fixed table x$ksqst stores statistics about total number of enqueue gets, success and failures of those gets at instance level. For example, to see total number of gets on HW enqueue, following query can be used. Column ksqstreq indicates total # of gets and ksqstwat shows total # of waits.

SQL> select ksqstreq, ksqstwat from x$ksqst where ksqsttyp='HW';

  KSQSTREQ   KSQSTWAT
---------- ----------
    546953         50

From Oracle version 10g and above, x$ksqst is externalized as v$enqueue_statistics.

However, this statistics shows activity at instance level. While we can use this statistics to measure HW enqueue activity , we need to make sure that there is no other session acquiring HW enqueue. Event 10704 can be used to trace enqueues and every call to get an enqueue prints few lines in the trace file. SQL statement to dump this information to trace file is :

alter session set events ‘10704 trace name context forever, level 15’;

Event 10704 is documented as below:

10704, 00000, "Print out information about what enqueues are being obtained"
// *Cause:  When enabled, prints out arguments to calls to ksqcmi and
//          ksqlrl and the return values.
// *Action: Level indicates details:
//   Level: 1-4: print out basic info for ksqlrl, ksqcmi
//          5-9: also print out stuff in callbacks:  ksqlac, ksqlop
//          10+: also print out time for each line

Few lines from the trace files printed below. ksq is internal Oracle module names for enqueues and ksqgtl is to get locks on a resource. From the lines below, we can see that HW enqueue is acquired in mode 6, exclusive mode. Timestamp is also printed since we enabled this event at level 15. If we need count number of HW enqueue gets, we need to count occurrences of HW- string in the trace file.

*** 2008-05-04 10:08:35.734
ksqgtl *** HW-00000007-01800014 mode=6 flags=0x11 timeout=21474836 ***
ksqgtl: xcb=0x1E283158, ktcdix=2147483647, topxcb=0x1E283158
	ktcipt(topxcb)=0x0

*** 2008-05-04 10:08:35.734
ksucti: init session DID from txn DID:
ksqgtl:
	ksqlkdid: 0001-0014-00000016

*** 2008-05-04 10:08:35.734
*** ksudidTrace: ksqgtl
	ktcmydid(): 0001-0014-00000016
	ksusesdi:   0000-0000-00000000
	ksusetxn:   0001-0014-00000016
ksqgtl: RETURNS 0

*** 2008-05-04 10:08:35.750
ksqrcl: HW,7,1800014
ksqrcl: returns 0

Now, we can grep for HW- in the trace file, count it and match that against v$enqueue_statistics. Following test case illustrates this method using an example table below:

SQL> select ksqstreq, ksqstwat from x$ksqst where ksqsttyp='HW';

  KSQSTREQ   KSQSTWAT
---------- ----------
    546198         50

SQL> insert into test_hw
     select n, lpad(n, 4000,'a') v1 from
     (select level n from dual connect by level  SQL> SQL> commit;

Commit complete.

SQL> select ksqstreq, ksqstwat from x$ksqst where ksqsttyp='HW';

  KSQSTREQ   KSQSTWAT
---------- ----------
    546953         50

A difference of 755 (546953-546198) total gets to HW enqueue.

Searching for HW- enqueues in the trace file also prints 755.

/oracle/app/oracle/admin/TEST1/udump> grep ‘HW-‘ test1_ora_26668.trc |wc -l
755

So, in my test database, my session is the only session and we could query v$enqueue_statistics for our test cases.

Test case

Following test case will be used to see the impact of extent size, segment management on HW enqueue gets. If total number of HW enqueue gets can be reduced, contention can be relieved.

Following script creates a tablespace, then creates a table with lob column in that tablespace, inserts 9999 rows in to that table and prints difference in total enqueue gets before and after insert statement.

-- Script enq_hw1.sql -----------
variable v_begin_cnt number
variable v_end_cnt number

prompt
prompt  Tablespace: Locally managed with \&1
prompt
drop tablespace TS_LMT_HW including contents and datafiles;

create tablespace TS_LMT_HW datafile 'D:\ORACLE\ORADATA\ORCL11G\TS_LMT_AUTO_1M_01.DBF'
 size 200M
 extent management local
\&1;

create table test_hw (n1 number ,  c1 clob )     tablespace TS_LMT_HW;

begin
  select total_req# into :v_begin_cnt from v$enqueue_statistics where 	eq_type ='HW';
end;
/
insert into test_hw
 select n, lpad(n, 4000,'a') v1 from
   (select level n from dual connect by level <10000);
commit;
select total_req#, succ_req#, failed_req# from v$enqueue_statistics where 	eq_type ='HW';

begin
  select total_req# into :v_end_cnt from v$enqueue_statistics where 	eq_type ='HW';
end;
/

select :v_end_cnt - :v_begin_cnt diff from dual;

--- script end enq_hw1.sql -----------

Above script is called by following script passing various tablespace attributes, essentially running same test for different types of tablespaces:

spool call_eng_hw1.lst
REM Test cases #1 through #6
@enq_hw1 "uniform size 5M segment space management manual"
@enq_hw1 "uniform size 5M segment space management auto"
@enq_hw1 "uniform size 40K segment space management manual"
@enq_hw1 "uniform size 40K segment space management auto"
@enq_hw1 "autoallocate segment space management manual"
@enq_hw1 "autoallocate segment space management auto"
spool off

Test Results

Tested above script for tablespace in versions 10.2.0.4 and 11.1.0.6. Here are the test results:

test	Extent management	Segment space management	10.2.0.4	11.1.0.6
#1	uniform size 5M	manual	2049	64
#2	uniform size 5M	auto	50	48
#3	uniform size 40K	manual	6604	6045
#4	uniform size 40K	auto	7552	7554
#5	autoallocate	manual	2231	279
#6	autoallocate	auto	269	291

There are few key points here.
1. In test cases #1 and #5, there is a dramatic decrease in enqueue gets between 10g and 11g for tablespace with segment space management set to manual. Looks like, a new feature faster lob is kicking in. Tested above script for a table without lob column. Virtually there is no difference between 10g and 11g, if the table has no lob column. row length is kept around 3000 bytes for this test.

  create table test_hw (n1 number ,  v1 varchar2(1000), v2 varchar2(1000), v3 varchar2(1000) )     tablespace TS_LMT_HW;
...
declare
   i number;
begin
  for i in 1 .. 10000
   loop
    insert into test_hw  values ( i, lpad(i, 1000, 'a'), lpad(i, 1000, 'a'), lpad(i, 1000, 'a')  );
	commit;
   end loop;
end;
/
...

test	Extent management	Segment space management	10.2.0.4	11.1.0.6
#1	uniform size 5M	manual	1020	1019
#2	uniform size 5M	auto	33	31
#3	uniform size 40K	manual	3004	3004
#4	uniform size 40K	auto	3055	3055
#5	autoallocate	manual	1132	1132
#6	autoallocate	auto	163	164

2. If tablespace uniform size is too low, then # of HW enqueue gets increases sharply. Compare test cases #1 & #3 for 11g. Enqueue gets decreased 10 times for tablespace with appropriate extent size.

3. In all test cases, automatic segment space management tablespaces performed fewer enqueue gets. In ASSM tablespaces HWM is bumped up by much higher number. I am not suggesting to use ASSM, since space wastage *can* increase in ASSM tablespaces. However, if resolving HW contention is primary issue, then consider ASSM.

4. Allocating additional extent with instance keyword seems to help in non-ASSM tablespace [ Behavior is different for ASSM tablespace and needs more research to understand that ]. In test case #1 above, HWM for the table was set at file_id 6, block_id 80 and that extent starting at file 6, block_id 9. That is, 70 blocks were below HWM initially. After allocating an extent with instance 1 keyword, HWM was bumped up by 1209 blocks.
[ Yong has a test case for this using dbms_space package: http://yong321.freeshell.org/oranotes/Dbms_Space.txt ]

From segment header block, before allocating extent, HWM: 0x01800050 (dba for file 6,block 80)
alter table test_hw allocate extent (instance 1);
From segment header block, after allocating extent, HWM: 0x01802f89 (dba for file 6,block 12169)

Extent Map
—————————————————————–
0x0180000a length: 639
0x01802d09 length: 640

5. High HW enqueue contention is prevalent during Oracle applications upgrade also. During one of our recent upgrade from 11.5.8 to 11.5.0, there was heavy HW enqueue contention on sys.source$ table due to many packages compiled/added during the upgrade. Only option was to increase _bump_highwater_mark_count during upgrade, to relieve excessive waits on HW enqueue contention. Of course, Oracle support must be contacted before adding any underscore parameters in production environment. Side effect of setting this parameter is that, for smaller tables, more blocks might be added below HWM leading to full table scan reading more blocks then necessary.