Speeding Up The Linux Kernel With Transparent Hugepage Support

Transparent Hugepages will not speed-up all Linux applications, but with memory and/or CPU intensive applications, it will cause some performance boosts, even without any user-land modifications. From the handful of Phoronix Test Suite benchmarks run, the best example we found was with NASA's OpenMP-based Fortran-written NAS Parallel Benchmarks. In particular, with the IS.C test, the performance jumped by more than 20%.

This though is an outlier with basic pieces of software (games, simple encoding tests, etc) not changing much and in other areas the gains were within a couple of percent.

It will be much more interesting though to see the performance once a number of Linux applications have been tuned to take advantage of this support and when the support is mainlined in the Linux kernel, which will hopefully be soon. More tests will be available at that time. Until then, try out the patches yourself.

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