Hi, 25th April 2001 13:28 hrs chennai

Latches are not buffers.It is a used to protect access to internal structures.

A process which needs to change this structures first need latches to acuire.

latches are held by them till it has finished its task.

Most cases of latch contention occur when two or more process concurrently attempt to btain the same latch.This rarely occurs on a single CPU computers where only single process can be active at once.

You can use v$latch and v$latchname to query the statistics.

The LOG_SIMULTANEOUS_COPIES should be always twice the number of CPU's

Cheers

Padmam