I was reading an article by one of my Tech Marketing colleagues, Kyle Gleed and coincidentally Gabe published an article about the same topic to which Frank replied and just now Forbes Guthrie… the topic being Large Pages. I have written about this topic many times in the past and both Kyle, Gabe, Forbes and Frank mentioned the possible impact [...]

Frank and I have discussed this topic multiple times and it was briefly mentioned in Frank’s excellent series about over-sizing virtual machines; Zero Pages, TPS and the impact of a boot-storm. Pre-vSphere 4.1 we have seen it all happen, a host fails and multiple VMs need to be restarted. Temporary contention exists as it could take up to 60 minutes [...]

I have written multiple articles(1, 2, 3, 4) on this topic so hopefully by now everyone knows that Large Pages are not shared by TPS. However when there is contention the large pages will be broken up in small pages and those will be shared based on the outcome of the TPS algorythm. Something I have always wondered and discussed [...]

Scott Lowe pointed to KB Article 1020524 in his short take article. Although I agree with Scott that it is a useful article it is actually technically incorrect. I wanted to point it out as when Scott points to something you know many will pick up on it. On Nehalem systems with Hardware assisted Memory Management Unit (MMU), TPS improves performance from 10 – 20% by using [...]

On the internal mailinglist there was a discussion today around how disabling TPS (Transparent Page Sharing) could negativitely impact performance. It is something I hadn’t thought about yet but when you do think about it it actually does make sense and is definitely something to keep in mind. Most new servers have some sort of NUMA architecture today. As hopefully [...]