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Malte Ubl 2d90508bc7 Move busy small-object slices to transparent huge pages
Every class slice used to opt out of transparent huge pages, so each
4 KiB the bump pointers crossed cost a page fault. Those faults (fault
entry, memcg charge, LRU insertion and the page clear) were 6-14% of
tsc-ts samples in the kernel. Backing the whole reservation with huge
pages removes most of them, but makes the 2 MiB page around every bump
pointer resident at once. A worker executable has up to 32 class slices
per script thread, so tRPC at 8 checkers grew from 558 to 955 MB.

A slice now starts on small pages. Once it has carved 8 MiB, the rest
of its range switches to huge pages (MADV_HUGEPAGE). Only slices that
already hold 8 MiB pay for a partial last huge page. The reservation is
huge-page aligned, so the switch point and every slice start on a 2 MiB
boundary. The slow path raises a slice's bump limit in two steps (to the
switch point, then to the slice end), so the inline fast paths are
unchanged. The policy is Linux-only; other targets keep one limit per
slice, as before. The allocator checks now build with _GNU_SOURCE on
Linux like the runtime packs, so the madvise advice is compiled in and
checked (alignment, contiguous carving across the switch, VmFlags nh/hg).

Measured with tsc-ts best-v1 (parallel-check + 6247795 e24057a 64d9af6
1c42c55), built with this runtime vs origin/main, on two Linux Vercel
Sandboxes (8 vCPU; 5-7 interleaved runs, medians). Columns: wall, max
RSS, minor faults; "all" is MADV_HUGEPAGE on the whole reservation:

  single-threaded   wall    RSS     faults         all: wall / RSS
  Excalidraw        -6.1%   +0.8%   331k -> 112k   -10.0% / +3.5%
  Playwright        -1.8%   +1.0%   371k -> 111k    -8.4% / +3.2%
  TypeORM           -7.2%   +0.9%   259k ->  75k   -11.8% / +4.1%
  tRPC              -5.0%   +2.0%   101k ->  47k    -9.0% / +11.3%
  tsc-ts self-check -2.9%   +2.6%   158k ->  64k    -3.1% / +8.4%

  --checkers 8
  Excalidraw        -2.9%   +2.6%  1075k -> 508k    -6.3% / +10.6%
  Playwright       -10.0%   +2.6%   739k -> 381k   -10.3% / +12.2%
  TypeORM           -5.9%   +2.2%   372k -> 232k   -10.1% / +27.7%
  tRPC              -2.5%   +2.5%   159k -> 125k    -4.3% / +71.2%
  tsc-ts self-check -4.0%   +3.9%   213k -> 172k   -12.1% / +46.3%

Switching at 2 or 4 MiB was up to about 1.5 points faster single-threaded
but cost up to +11% RSS at 8 checkers. 16 MiB gave back most of the gain.
Prefaulting small pages with MADV_POPULATE_WRITE did not reduce sys time.
Collapsing the small-page prefix with MADV_COLLAPSE at the switch did not
help either. The runtime benchmark suite (--layouts=4 --runs=16) shows a
geomean change of -1.2%: inventory-report -9.9%, validate-errors -5.3%,
log-summary -2.9%, and regex-logs +2.1%. regex-logs peaks at 6.8 MB and
never reaches the switch point; with one binary the policy measures -0.9%
there, so its delta comes from code layout.
2026-10-10 14:03:22 -07:00
..
2026-07-22 18:08:04 -05:00
2026-10-10 10:08:39 -05:00