The Latch Files 4: Superlatch promotion logic

In Part 3 I explained how this beast called the buffer latch cycle-based latch promotion threshold gets calculated and broadly what it means, but I didn’t tackle the obvious question of “who does what with this information?”. This post will tie some global settings together with per-buffer tracking to unravel the mystery of when a buffer latch is deemed hot enough to deserve a promotion. What I describe applies identically to SQL Server 2014 and SQL Server 2016, and it is likely that it wouldn’t have changed much from preceding versions, although I haven’t confirmed this.

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Mugatu assesses breferences

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The Latch Files 3: Superlatch promotion threshold

Here’s something odd. If you do an online search for “SQL Server latch promotion”, a number of top hits (e.g. this, this and this) don’t actually concern latch promotion, but rather an obscure informational message that seemed to come out of the woodwork in 2008 R2: Warning: Failure to calculate super-latch promotion threshold.”.

Somewhere among those hits you’ll find one of the very few sources around latch promotion, Bob Dorr’s excellent “How it works” blog post. One thing that bugs me about this picture is that latch promotion clearly isn’t that much talked about until people see unusual messages in their error logs.
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