Progress Latches Test

A latch is a “lightweight lock”. A latch acts like a lock, in that its purpose is to prevent data from changing unexpectedly. Just like a lock, a latch can prevent the Progress database server from accessing rows in a database, which can hurt performance. Because of this, latch wait time must be minimized.

For each type of latch on the Progress database, this test measures the latching activity.

Target of the test : A Progress Database server

Agent deploying the test : An internal agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for every latch type on the target Progress database server that is to be monitored

Configurable parameters for the test
Parameter	Description
Test Period	How often should the test be executed
Host	The IP address of the Progress database server.
Port	The port number on which the database server is listening. By default, this is NULL.
Database Name	Specify the name of the Progress database instance that is to be monitored.
Username	In order to monitor a Progress database instance, a special database user account has to be created in every Progress database instance that requires monitoring. This special user needs to be granted a set of privileges. To know how to create the database user and grant the required privileges, refer to Pre-Requisites for monitoring the Progress database. Specify the name of such a user in this text box.
Password	The password of the specified Username.
Confirm Password	Confirm the password by retyping it here.

Measurements made by the test
Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Busy rate	Indicates the number of latches of this type that were busy per second during the last measurement period.	Latches/sec
Lock rate	Indicates the rate at which the locks were held on this latch type during the last measurement period.	Locks/sec	A low value is desired for this measure.
Spin rate	Indicates the rate at which the process will spin again and attempt to get a latch of this type if the latch is not available immediately during the last measurement period.	Spins/Sec
Average lock time	Indicates the time for which the latch of this type was held.	Seconds
Average wait time	Indicates the average duration for which the sessions were waiting for latch of this type.	Seconds	Ideally, this value should be close to 0. The larger this value is, the more contention there is for latches and worse the performance of the database. If the wait time is high, check the SYSPROCESSES table of the database to see which latches are seeing most contention.