maybe not many people use MTS recently due to nearly-free RAM. But when connection# goes real high, you still have to, and we are such a user. We experienced huge "latch:shared pool" contention in 10.2 MTS environment, while on 9i it was fine. And we *guess* it is mainly from sort/hash, which will allocate memory/deallocate from large pool, and large pool is managed by shared pool latch. From statspack, the top functions that called shared pool latch is: kghalo, and kghfre. Also we are running with sort-area-size. no work-area-size-policy auto (though 10g start to support that). Anyone has experience with MTS/shared pool latch? -- Regards Zhu Chao www.cnoug.org