Some hardware/operating system architectures support memory pages greater than the default (usually 4KB). The actual implementation of this support depends on the underlying hardware and operating system. Applications that perform a lot of memory accesses may obtain performance improvements by using large pages due to reduced Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) misses.

In MySQL, large pages can be used by InnoDB, to allocate memory for its buffer pool and additional memory pool.

Standard use of large pages in MySQL attempts to use the largest size supported, up to 4MB. Under Solaris, a “super large pages” feature enables uses of pages up to 256MB. This feature is available for recent SPARC platforms. It can be enabled or disabled by using the --super-large-pages or --skip-super-large-pages option.

MySQL also supports the Linux implementation of large page support (which is called HugeTLB in Linux).

Before large pages can be used on Linux, the kernel must be enabled to support them and it is necessary to configure the HugeTLB memory pool. For reference, the HugeTBL API is documented in the Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt file of your Linux sources.

The kernel for some recent systems such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux appear to have the large pages feature enabled by default. To check whether this is true for your kernel, use the following command and look for output lines containing “huge”:

shell> cat /proc/meminfo | grep -i huge
HugePages_Total:       0
HugePages_Free:        0
HugePages_Rsvd:        0
HugePages_Surp:        0
Hugepagesize:       4096 kB

The nonempty command output indicates that large page support is present, but the zero values indicate that no pages are configured for use.

If your kernel needs to be reconfigured to support large pages, consult the hugetlbpage.txt file for instructions.

Assuming that your Linux kernel has large page support enabled, configure it for use by MySQL using the following commands. Normally, you put these in an rc file or equivalent startup file that is executed during the system boot sequence, so that the commands execute each time the system starts. The commands should execute early in the boot sequence, before the MySQL server starts. Be sure to change the allocation numbers and the group number as appropriate for your system.

# Set the number of pages to be used.
# Each page is normally 2MB, so a value of 20 = 40MB.
# This command actually allocates memory, so this much
# memory must be available.
echo 20 > /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages

# Set the group number that is permitted to access this
# memory (102 in this case). The mysql user must be a
# member of this group.
echo 102 > /proc/sys/vm/hugetlb_shm_group

# Increase the amount of shmem permitted per segment
# (12G in this case).
echo 1560281088 > /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax

# Increase total amount of shared memory.  The value
# is the number of pages. At 4KB/page, 4194304 = 16GB.
echo 4194304 > /proc/sys/kernel/shmall

For MySQL usage, you normally want the value of shmmax to be close to the value of shmall.

To verify the large page configuration, check /proc/meminfo again as described previously. Now you should see some nonzero values:

shell> cat /proc/meminfo | grep -i huge
HugePages_Total:      20
HugePages_Free:       20
HugePages_Rsvd:        0
HugePages_Surp:        0
Hugepagesize:       4096 kB

The final step to make use of the hugetlb_shm_group is to give the mysql user an “unlimited” value for the memlock limit. This can by done either by editing /etc/security/limits.conf or by adding the following command to your mysqld_safe script:

ulimit -l unlimited

Adding the ulimit command to mysqld_safe causes the root user to set the memlock limit to unlimited before switching to the mysql user. (This assumes that mysqld_safe is started by root.)

Large page support in MySQL is disabled by default. To enable it, start the server with the --large-pages option. For example, you can use the following lines in your server's my.cnf file:

[mysqld]
large-pages

With this option, InnoDB uses large pages automatically for its buffer pool and additional memory pool. If InnoDB cannot do this, it falls back to use of traditional memory and writes a warning to the error log: Warning: Using conventional memory pool

To verify that large pages are being used, check /proc/meminfo again:

shell> cat /proc/meminfo | grep -i huge
HugePages_Total:      20
HugePages_Free:       20
HugePages_Rsvd:        2
HugePages_Surp:        0
Hugepagesize:       4096 kB