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Re: Lock tuning



On 1/3/07, Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com> wrote:
matthew sporleder wrote:
> After reading
> http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/berkeley-db/db/ref/lock/max.html
>
>
> I started to look at db_stat -c and noticed this:
> 5203    Total number of locks not immediately available due to conflicts.
> 15      Number of deadlocks.

> Any hints as to why I would have deadlocks, or locks not available?
> Maybe I'm misreading what a conflict is vs just contention.

> Thanks,
> _Matt
>
> (.. if only I knew what the conflict matrix was trying to say ;)
> .
>
All of that is normal. A lock conflict occurs whenever two different threads
try to lock the same object, using incompatible modes. The conflict matrix
tells you which modes are compatible. E.g., a read lock is compatible with
other read locks, but not with a write lock. So if one thread already has a
write lock on an object, any other thread that tries to get a read lock on
the same object will conflict. The BDB lock subsystem supports a lot of other
modes as well, but we don't use them explicitly; they're mainly used
internally in the BDB library.

Deadlocks are a pretty much unavoidable occurrence when you have multiple
threads active, obtaining multiple types of locks at the same time. We try to
acquire resources in a consistent order to minimize them, but there's a lot
of lock activity happening inside the BDB library that we have no direct
control over. It's not a big deal; the code retries automatically when a
deadlock occurs.


Thanks for the re-assurance.