Section 13.1. Determining When to Use Large Pages

13.1. Determining When to Use Large Pages

To determine whether we can improve application performance by using a larger page size, we need to determine the amount of time the microprocessor or operation spends servicing translation lookaside buffer (TLB) misses on behalf of a target application. TLB misses are typically accounted for in the context of the process running; for example, if a TLB miss occurs in a user-mode application, it will be counted as user time. Thus, an application might spend a large amount of time having TLB misses serviced for it but still report that it spends 100% of its time in user mode.

sol8# mpstat 1 3 CPU minf mjf xcal  intr ithr  csw icsw migr smtx  srw syscl  usr sys  wt idl   0    2   0    1   234  134   91   46    0    0    0    25  100   0   0   0   0    2   0    1   234  134   91   46    0    0    0    25  100   0   0   0   0    2   0    1   234  134   91   46    0    0    0    25  100   0   0   0 .