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HugePages

PostPosted: Thu May 02, 2013 2:35 pm
by Micro
I've been doing some work with HugePages on oracle/RHEL machines and I thought I'd share the theory behind this. Hope you find it interesting. 8-) Huge pages in Linux has been supported for more than 10 years now but only recently in the past couple years, has become painless to implement. As per my Oracle Documentation, HugePages is a Linux Kernel 2.6 integrated feature. It is a method to have larger page size that is useful for working with very large memory. HugePages is useful for both 32-bit and 64-bit configurations. HugePage sizes vary from 2MB to 256MB, depending on the kernel version and the hardware architecture. For Oracle Databases, using HugePages reduces the operating system maintenance of page states, and increases Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) hit ratio. So what does this all mean? It means that you can reduce overhead by having the Linux Kernel allocate a portion of physical memory to be addressed using a larger page size. And have applications request this dedicated memory usage specifically. This is very useful when having a extremely resource intensive service running on your server. ;)