Mechanisms for improving resource usage of a computing system by properly balancing the timing of performance degradation analysis of an executable action set of a query based on an impact on the workload of that query. The mechanism collects workload metrics for each of multiple queries and their associated executable action sets. Performance degradation occurs when the current executed action set is no longer appropriate for the corresponding query such that more resources are used than are necessary. For each query, the system determines whether to perform degradation analysis of the current executable action set in a manner that is workload aware. That is, queries that occupy more computing resources or that impact the overall workload more will tend to have degradation analysis performed more frequently than those queries that have less impact on the overall workload. This results in improved resource usage for the workload with low overhead.