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I asked a question about soft page faults here without any answer yet

optimization of soft page faults

I wonder whether changing the default page size (4Kb) would make any difference to the number of page faults I am seeing if it were larger, say 64Kb.

Anybody know how this can be accomplished, at least so I can do further testing to see impact?

Are there any side effects of doing so?

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Adam Fox
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1 Answers1

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Yes, increasing the size of the pages would reduce the number of pagefault, but instead make each pagefault much more expensive.

It would take more time to fetch the pages, increase the impact of memory fragmentation and and generally make your system performance more uneven. Page size is a tradeoff, you typically only increase the page size if you are running into performance problems that are related to the size of the page table.

In addition, many applications are written by people who know the default allocation size and optimize for it. If you change from the default allocation you are likely to reduce performance in these applications.

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