Mysteries of NUMA Memory Management Revealed

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The memory subsystem is one of the most critical components of modern server systems–it supplies critical run-time data and instructions to applications and to the operating system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a number of tools for managing memory. This post illustrates how you can use these tools to boost the performance of systems with NUMA topologies.

Practically all modern multi-socket server systems are non-uniform memory access (NUMA) machines where local memory is directly connected to each processor. While memory attached to other CPUs is still accessible – access comes at the cost of reduced performance. The result is “non-uniform” access times. The art of managing NUMA lies in achieving affinity between CPUs and memory by placing and binding application processes to the most suitable system resources.

Read more at Red Hat blog.