Does a smaller page size lead to smaller page table(s)? If so, is that good or bad !? I think that this lead to more data handling.Is it possible:to test that within Linux manually orthat this stuff is defined by the Linux kernel ? If so, I have no chance to test that.
What is the effect of smaller pages?
kernel;performance
The amount of paging space is fixed (but configurable) on any given system, so having smaller pages means that you have more pages available. The trade off is entirely performance based. It depends on what the application uses. Oracle for example may benefit from pages of size X, while Informatica may benefit from pages of size Y (picked two applications I've configured paging sizes for in the past). Having a smaller page size means that you have to perform more operations to get more data, but you have more pages available. Having a larger page size means you can read more contiguous page blocks (thus increased performance for larger page reads) but you have fewer available pages.I know Oracle uses a mix depending on the type and use of a database, so it can be configured to have a certain number of huge pages, and a certain number of regular/small pages. (Again, using Oracle from my own experience, but other applications do this too I'm sure.)So neither is good or bad, it just depends on the usage of a particular application. It's configured on the server layer though, so if you have two applications on the same system that need different size pages, performance will suffer.You can test it manually in a variety of ways. Depending on your OS distribution/platform (Solaris, Linux, etc.) there should be plenty of documentation on how to configure this.