Memomania
Mohammad Agbarya, Idan Yaniv, Dan Tsafrir · 2018
Linux Transparent Huge Pages (THP) are not able to minimize the virtual memory overhead because they are limited to 2MB pages. We introduce Memomania, a flexible memory allocator that is able to transparently back the application with a mixture of 2MB and 1GB pages. We use Memomania to characterize a subset of SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks and find that (1) using 1GB pages provides a notable runtime improvement compared to THP, and that (2) in some cases, allocating more 2MB pages to an application degrades its performance. We suggest that Memomania can be used in (1) placement algorithms, and (2) micro-architectural studies.