Has anybody tried enabling "large page support" in Mysql for Xwiki?
Doesn't Xwiki make use of Large pages for document attachments and other
storage, and wouldn't this be useful for high-volume Xwiki based systems?
(Fedora Linux has this feature enabled by default.)
The improvement? "Applications that perform a lot of memory accesses may
obtain performance improvements by using large pages due to reduced
Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) misses."
Is this worth doing? Would it improve performance (or are bottlenecks
elsewhere that make this tweak irrelevant)?
............
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-configuration.html says:
> On Linux, if the kernel is enabled for large page support, InnoDB can use
> large pages to allocate memory for its buffer pool and additional memory
> pool. See Section 7.5.9, “Enabling Large Page Support”.
--> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/large-page-support.html says:
> 7.5.9. Enabling Large Page Support
> Some hardware/operating system architectures support memory pages greater
> than the default (usually 4KB). The actual implementation of this support
> depends on the underlying hardware and operating system. Applications that
> perform a lot of memory accesses may obtain performance improvements by
> using large pages due to reduced Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) misses.
> In MySQL, large pages can be used by InnoDB, to allocate memory for its
> buffer pool and additional memory pool.
> Currently, MySQL supports only the Linux implementation of large page
> support (which is called HugeTLB in Linux).
> Before large pages can be used on Linux, the kernel must be enabled to
> support them and it is necessary to configure the HugeTLB memory pool. For
> reference, the HugeTBL API is documented in the
> Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt file of your Linux sources.
> The kernel for some recent systems such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux appear
> to have the large pages feature enabled by default. To check whether this is
> true for your kernel, use the following command and look for output lines
> containing “huge”:
> shell> cat /proc/meminfo | grep -i huge
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
HugePages_Surp: 0
Hugepagesize: 4096 kB
> The nonempty command output indicates that large page support is present,
> but the zero values indicate that no pages are configured for use.
> If your kernel needs to be reconfigured to support large pages, consult the
> hugetlbpage.txt file for instructions.
> Assuming that your Linux kernel has large page support enabled, configure
> it for use by MySQL using the following commands. Normally, you put these in
> an rc file or equivalent startup file that is executed during the system
> boot sequence, so that the commands execute each time the system starts. The
> commands should execute early in the boot sequence, before the MySQL server
> starts. Be sure to change the allocation numbers and the group number as
> appropriate for your system.
> [...]
> With this option, InnoDB uses large pages automatically for its buffer pool
> and additional memory pool. If InnoDB cannot do this, it falls back to use
> of traditional memory and writes a warning to the error log: Warning: Using
> conventional memory pool
> To verify that large pages are being used, check /proc/meminfo again:
> shell> cat /proc/meminfo | grep -i huge
HugePages_Total: 20
HugePages_Free: 20
HugePages_Rsvd: 2
HugePages_Surp: 0
Hugepagesize: 4096 kB
Niels
http://nielsmayer.com
