[LSF/MM TOPIC] THP page cache

[LSF/MM TOPIC] THP page cache

[Kirill A. Shutemov]

Hi,

I believe we will get to transparent huge pages at summit anyway. Below is data
points on file-backed transparent huge pages.

The code I have by the time is in my repo[1], see branches
thp/pc/v7/p1-base and thp/pc/v7/p2-mmap. Ning Qu works on rebasing
shmem/tmpfs support on top of this.

Workloads known to benefit from THP for page cache:

- MongoDB: mongoperf on ramfs shows increase number of iops by 1.9x for r/o and
  1.7x for r/w;
- Google search/indexing benchmark shows +3% (in addition to +5% from AnonTHP),
  on pair with hugetlbfs;
- IOZone shows improvement up to 2.5x on ramfs;

Should help also with:

- Reducing ITLB pressure:
  + x86-64 binaries is ready to be mapped with 2M pages: binutils creates
    binaries with required file offset and virtual address alignment, no
    changes required;
  + reported 11% performance increase of RDBMS by putting code to hugetlbfs;
  + MySQL spends 2.5% of cycles in page table walk due ITLB misses[2];
- HPC workloads on many-cores systems (like Xeon Phi): large code and data,
  small TLB, limited memory bandwidth.

[1] git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/kas/linux.git
[2] http://research.cs.wisc.edu/multifacet/papers/isca13_direct_segment.pdf

-- 
 Kirill A. Shutemov

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