Freund seems to suggest that hugepages is the right way to run a system under this sort of load - which is the fix.

> Hah. I had reflexively used huge_pages=on - as that is the only sane thing to do with 10s to 100s of GB of shared memory and thus part of all my benchmarking infrastructure - during the benchmark runs mentioned above.

> Turns out, if I disable huge pages, I actually can reproduce the contention that Salvatore reported (didn't see whether it's a regression for me though). Not anywhere close to the same degree, because the bottleneck for me is the writes.

But, they can speak for themselves here [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646332