The lookaside (cache overflow) table in WiredTiger has 5 cursors open on it, that are shared by all threads writing to the lookaside table. If there is contention on using those cursors we start backing off from acquiring one using a sleep - see __wt_las_cursor for the code.

We should add a statistic that will tell us if there is contention on the lookaside cursors, and consider implementing a smarter access scheme.