alt Hacker News> The whole discourse was poisoned years ago when the author of Redis told everyone to disable THP on Linux
What's the story behind that? Do normal programs really get affected by this?
Normal programs are most likely using glibc's memory allocator, and I'd be surprised if it was incapable of handling arbitrary page sizes. Only reason why I have to care is I implemented my own memory allocator.
Redis uses jemalloc by default, if I recall correctly, but its hostility to the way systems actually work arises from the way that it forks, then changes one bit on every page in the entire virtual space, which causes a lot of kernel work to support copy-on-write by blowing up huge pages into smaller pages. That's what happens when your program is antagonistic to the way the machine actually works.