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 all of you know TPS does not cross a NUMA node boundary. This basically means that pages will not be shared between NUMA nodes. Another thing that Frank Denneman already described in his article here is that when memory pages are allocated remotely there is a memory penalty associated with it. (Did you know there is an “esxtop” metric, N%L,which shows the percentage of remote pages?) These pages are accessed across an interconnect bus which is always slower than so called local memory.
Now you might ask what is the link between NUMA, TPS and degraded performance? Think about it for a second… TPS decreases the amount of physical pages needed. If TPS is disabled there is no sharing and chances of going across NUMA nodes are increased and as stated this will definitely impact performance. Funny how disabling a mechanism(TPS) which is often associated with “CPU overhead” can have a negative impact on memory latency.
