gc buffer busy release

Last week (March 2012), I was conducting Advanced RAC Training online. During the class, I was recreating a ‘gc buffer busy’ waits to explain the concepts and methods to troubleshoot the issue.

Definitions

Let’s define these events first. Event ‘gc buffer busy’ event means that a session is trying to access a buffer,but there is an open request for Global cache lock for that block already, and so, the session must wait for the GC lock request to complete before proceeding. This wait is instrumented as ‘gc buffer busy’ event.

From 11g onwards, this wait event is split in to ‘gc buffer busy acquire’ and ‘gc buffer busy release’. An attendee asked me to show the differentiation between these two wait events. Fortunately, we had a problem with LGWR writes and we were able to inspect the waits with much clarity during the class.