It is crucial to understand that cschedspins is a tunable parameter (recommended values being between 1-2000) and the optimum value is completely dependent on the customer's environment. cschedspins is used by the scheduler only when it finds that there are no runnable tasks. If there are no runnable tasks, the scheduler has two options:

1. Let the engine go to sleep (which is done by an OS call) for a specified interval or until an event happens. This option assumes that tasks won't become runnable because of tasks executing on other engines. This would happen when the tasks are waiting for I/O more than any other resource such as locks. Which means that we could free up the CPU resource (by going to sleep) and let the system use it to expedite completion of system tasks including I/O.

2. Go and look for a ready task again. This option assumes that a task would become runnable in the near term and so incurring the extra cost of an OS context switch through the OS sleep/wakeup mechanism is unacceptable. This scenario assumes that tasks are waiting on resources such as locks, which could free up because of tasks executing on other engines, more than they wait for I/O.