Ewald Cress discusses a “secret” spinlock within latches:
No matter how bad contention gets for normal spinlocks, at least we account for cycles spent spinning: this stuff gets exposed in sys.dm_os_spinlock_stats and can allow us to diagnose and quantify contention. However, spinning done on a latch’s spinlock gets no obviously visible accounting. As such, if we did somehow manage to accrue a large number of spins on a very hot latch, it wouldn’t be obvious that the time went into spinning. This is not to say of course that it is necessarily a common problem, just that it would be hard to prove one way or the other.
If I appear to be painting a bleak picture, I apologise. Given the importance of latches, especially buffer latches, one would assume that the SQL Server development teams would be on the constant lookout for opportunities to identify issues and mitigate against them. And this is exactly the kind of scenario where some bright spark comes up with the idea of superlatches.
Read the whole thing.