Re: Report: Linux huge pages with Postgres

Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu> writes:
> On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 12:12 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> Really you do want to scrape the value.

> Couldn't we just round the shared memory allocation down to a multiple
> of 4MB? That would handle all older architectures where the size is
> 2MB or 4MB.

Rounding *down* will not work, at least not without extremely invasive
changes to the shmem allocation code. Rounding up is okay, as long as
you don't mind some possibly-wasted space.

> I see online that IA64 supports larger page sizes up to 256MB but then
> could we make it the user's problem if they change their hugepagesize
> to a larger value to pick a value of shared_buffers that will fit
> cleanly? We might need to rejigger things so that the shared memory
> segment is exactly the size of shared_buffers and any other shared
> data structures are in a separate segment though for that to work.

Two shmem segments would be a pretty serious PITA too, certainly a lot
more so than a few lines to read a magic number from /proc.

But this is all premature pending a demonstration that there's enough
potential gain here to be worth taking any trouble at all. The one
set of numbers we have says otherwise.

regards, tom lane