This guide describes how to identify and resolve latch contention issues observed when running SQL Server applications on high concurrency systems with certain workloads.

As the number of CPU cores on servers continues to increase, the associated increase in concurrency can introduce contention points on data structures that must be accessed in a serial fashion within the database engine. This is especially true for high throughput/high concurrency transaction processing (OLTP) workloads. There are a number of tools, techniques, and ways to approach these challenges as well as practices that can be followed in designing applications which may help to avoid them altogether. This article will discuss a particular type of contention on data structures that use spinlocks to serialize access to these data structures.

Link to PDF : Diagnose and resolve latch contention on SQL Server