Summary

This article contains a high level overview of Transparent Huge Pages and Huge Pages. It covers the configuration of Huge Pages and offers advice as to when Huge Pages should be used and how they can be configured.

To the Linux kernel, "pages" describe a unit of memory; by default this should be 2048 KiB. You can confirm this from the terminal by issuing a call to getconf PAGESIZE.

Huge Pages (and Transparent Huge Pages) allow areas of memory to be reserved for resources which are likely to be accessed frequently, such as group level caches. Enabling (and configuring) Huge Pages can increase performance because - when enabled - caches should always be resident in memory.

Huge Pages

In general you should follow the recommendation stated in the MarkLogic Installation Guide for All Platforms, which states:

On Linux systems, MarkLogic recommends setting Linux Huge Pages to around 3/8 the size of your physical memory. For details on setting up Huge Pages, refer to the following KB

Group Caches and Linux Huge Pages

Caution

Since the OS and server perform many memory allocations that do not and cannot use huge pages, it may not be possible to configure the full 3/8 for huge pages.  It is not advised to configure more than 3/8 of memory to huge pages.

Calculating the number of Huge Pages to configure:

On an x86 system the default Huge Page size is 2048 KiB.  This can be confirmed using the command "cat /proc/meminfo | grep Hugepagesize".  On a system with 64GiB of physical memory it would be advised to configure 12288 Huge Pages or 24GiB.

Alternatively, MarkLogic provides a recommended range for the number of Huge Pages that should be used.  This recommendation can be seen in the ErrorLog.txt file located in /var/opt/MarkLogic/Logs/ just after the server is started.  Right after starting the server, look for a message that looks like this:

2019-09-01 17:33:14.894 Info: Linux Huge Pages: detected 0, recommend 11360 to 15413

The lower bound includes all group-level caches, while the upper bound also includes in-memory stand sizes.

Allocating Huge Pages

Since Huge Pages require large areas of contiguous physical memory, it is advised to allocate huge pages at boot time.  This can be accomplished by placing vm.nr_hugepages = 11360 into the /etc/sysctl.conf file.

Transparent Huge Pages

The Transparent Huge Page (THP) implementation in the Linux kernel includes functionality that provides compaction. Compaction operations are system level processes that are resource intensive, potentially causing resource starvation to the MarkLogic process. Using static Huge Pages is the preferred memory configuration for several high performance database platforms including MarkLogic Server. The recommended method to disable THP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 and 8, is to disable it in the grub2 configuration file, and then rebuild the grub2 configuration.  The following articles from Red Hat detail the process of disabling THP:

How to disable transparent hugepages (THP) on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

How to disable transparent hugepage (THP) on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

Previous Releases

If you are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS 6, you must turn off Transparent Huge Pages (Transparent Huge Pages are configured automatically by the operating system).

The preferred method to disable Transparent HugePages is to add "transparent_hugepage=never" to the kernel boot line in the "/etc/grub.conf" file.

This solution (disabling Transparent HugePages) is covered in detail in this article on RedHat's website

[ref:https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/virtualization_tuning_and_optimization_guide/sect-virtualization_tuning_optimization_guide-memory-tuning#sect-Virtualization_Tuning_Optimization_Guide-Memory-Huge_Pages]

[ref: http://docs.marklogic.com/guide/installation/intro#id_11335]

RHEL 6 | CentOS 6: Kernels newer than kernel-2.6.32-504.23.4. A race condition can manifest itself as system crash in region_* functions when HugePages are enabled. [1]

Resolution options:
1. Update kernel to 2.6.32-504.40.1.el6 or later, which includes the fix for this issue.

2. Downgrade the kernel to a version before 2.6.32-504.23.4.

3. Disable Huge Pages completely, which might impact MarkLogic’s performance by ~5-15%.
    (Set the value of vm.nr_hugepages=0)

References:
[1] [ref: RedHat Knowledge-base article: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1992703]