SPEC CPU2006 Platform Settings for SGI Intel-based systems

Operating System Tuning Parameters

Transparent Huge Pages

On SLES11 SP2 and later, Transparent Hugepages increase the memory page size from 4 kilobytes to 2 megabytes. Transparent Hugepages provide significant performance advantages on systems with highly contended resources and large memory workloads. If memory utilization is too high or memory is badly fragmented which prevents hugepages being allocated, the kernel will assign smaller 4k pages instead.
Hugepages are used by default unless the /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled field is changed from its default of 'always' to 'never' or 'madvise'.