MySQL and large pages/hugetlb performance gain in numbers?

Solution 1:

Not a MySQL example, but I have seen this exact behavior in Oracle:

http://www.pythian.com/blog/performance-tuning-hugepages-in-linux/

As the post points out, look at /proc/meminfo at the size of PageTables. If you're seeing huge waste of RAM for page tables, you might spend significant CPU time managing them.

MySQL also has some notes on how to implement it and why you would:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/large-page-support.html

Applications that perform a lot of memory accesses may obtain performance improvements by using large pages due to reduced Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) misses.