Re: So, can we stop supporting Windows native now?

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 2:53 AM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
> It would also be nice to find out why we can't usefully scale shared buffers
> higher like we can on *nix.

Has anyone ever looked into whether asking for SEC_LARGE_PAGES would
help with that? I noticed that another popular RDBMS recommends
enabling this to see a gain when its buffer pool is "several
gigabytes".

I don't do Windows myself, but from poking around in the docs, it
looks like you need to grant SeLockMemoryPrivilege (Start > Control
Panel > Administrative Tools > Local Security Policy > User Rights
Assignment > Lock pages in memory > Action > Properties) because large
pages can't be swapped out (just like on other OSs). So maybe it
could work like huge_pages = try on Linux so that it works out of the
box with 4K pages, but starts using 2MB (?) pages if you grant
SeLockMemoryPrivilege.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366543(v=vs.85).aspx

Just a thought.

--
Thomas Munro
http://www.enterprisedb.com