Investigating Lock Contention Effects on Performance

Some load or query performance issues result from lock contention. If your kernel system time is greater than 10%, you may be experiencing lock contention.

  1. To find out if lock contention is affecting performance on your system, do one of the following:
    • Run the SAP Sybase IQ monitor with the -contention option.
    • On UNIX platforms, run the sar or vmstat utility.
    • On Windows platforms, check the CPU usage in the Task Manager.
  2. If you suspect lock contention, you may find it useful to control the level of partitioning directly by setting:
    • The -iqpartition server startup option.
    • The cache_partitions database option.
    Note: Higher than normal kernel system time can also indicate that your kernel is not well tuned. If this is the case, you may need to adjust kernel parameters; changing SAP Sybase IQ settings does not fix an improperly tuned kernel.
Related reference
CACHE_PARTITIONS Option