Huge pages for NFV memory optimization
You can optimize physical memory page size for your environment.
Physical memory is segmented into contiguous regions called pages. For efficiency, the system retrieves memory by accessing entire pages instead of individual bytes of memory. To perform this translation, the system looks in the Translation Lookaside Buffers (TLB) that contain the physical to virtual address mappings for the most recently or frequently used pages. When the system cannot find a mapping in the TLB, the processor must iterate through all of the page tables to determine the address mappings. Optimize the TLB to minimize the performance penalty that occurs during these TLB misses.
The typical page size in an x86 system is 4KB, with other larger page sizes available. Larger page sizes mean that there are fewer pages overall, and therefore increases the amount of system memory that can have its virtual to physical address translation stored in the TLB. Consequently, this reduces TLB misses, which increases performance. With larger page sizes, there is an increased potential for memory to be under-utilized as processes must allocate in pages, but not all of the memory is likely required. As a result, choosing a page size is a compromise between providing faster access times with larger pages, and ensuring maximum memory utilization with smaller pages.