Examining cache needs for transaction logs

On SMP systems with high transaction rates, bind the transaction log to its own cache to reduce cache spinlock contention in the default data cache. In many cases, the log cache can be very small.

The current page of the transaction log is written to disk when transactions commit, so try to size the log to reduce the number of times that processes that need to reread log pages must go to disk because the pages have been flushed from the cache.

These Adaptive Server processes need to read log pages:

When sizing a cache for a transaction log:

Use this log growth estimate and the time estimate to size the log cache. For example, if the longest deferred update takes 5 minutes, and the transaction log for the database grows at 125 pages per minute, 625 pages are allocated for the log while this transaction executes.

If a few transactions or queries are especially long-running, you may want to size the log for the average, rather than the maximum, length of time.