Memory use considerations for larger page sizes

When you are evaluating the potential performance impacts of using a larger page size for an application, the memory use of a workload must be considered.

Using a larger page size can result in an increased memory footprint of a workload due to memory fragmentation. The svmon and vmstat commands can be used to monitor a workload’s memory use to determine if a workload’s memory footprint increases when using larger page sizes.

When considering a 64 KB page size, use the default page size instead and allow the operating system to decide which page size to use. If the application's working set is densely populated, such that full 64 KB regions are needed, then selecting 64 KB pages would be appropriate since there would be little memory wasted (such as allocated but never used).