Efficient Huge Page Management with Xpage

Wenqi Cao, Ling Liu, Gong Su, Arun Iyengar

Abstract: An efficient approach to managing big data workloads is to enable applications to work directly with huge pages. This can effectively avoid or reduce the memory fragmentation problem due to high frequent memory allocation and deallocation and significantly minimize the performance degradation of big data applications. This paper presents XPage, a huge page memory management framework, with three novel features. First, XPage by design can provide automated huge page managements with transparency to both OS and applications. Second, Xpage represents a memory management redesign that brings performance and memory saving to memory intensive applications by supporting dynamic huge page memory management without resorting to splitting huge pages for memory fragmentation. Third but not the least, XPage can efficiently minimize the internal fragmentation without impacting performance of applications. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of XPage in minimizing internal memory fragmentation in the presence of dynamic memory intensive big data workloads, by comparing XPage with vanilla Linux using 4KB base page and Linux with 2MB huge page.