Many applications benefit significantly from the use of huge
pages. However, huge-page allocations often incur a high latency or even
fail under fragmented memory conditions. Proactive compaction may provide an
effective solution to these problems by doing memory compaction in the
background. With guest author Nitin Gupta’s proposed proactive compaction
implementation, typical huge-page allocation
latencies are reduced by a factor of 70-80 while incurring minimal CPU
overhead.
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Source: LWN.net – [$] Proactive compaction for the kernel