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I don't believe huge pages work on PV machine running Amazon's AMI OS. I would like to know if this is related to the Amazon OS, or the virtualisation type. I believe huge pages can be enabled (somehow) on a PV machine, but it is more generally supported on a HVM virtualisation type. Is that right?

I believe Amazon 2016.03 is running a modified version of Centos 6.x.

I am using Amazon Linux AMI 2016.03, but I don't think that really matters.

Huge pages are recommended with the database I am using.

References both relating to Oracle (DB, I think):

  1. https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=406807
  2. https://www.pythian.com/blog/linux-hugepages-for-oracle-on-amazon-ec2-possible-but-not-convenient-easy-or-fully-supported/

Related question with a different OS (Debian):

How can I use huge pages and libhugetlbfs on a Debian EC2 PVM instance?

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  • HVM seems to be the recommended VM type for most workloads. Why are you using PV? – Tim Sep 13 '16 at 17:39
  • It's from an older AMI, that's a PV AMI. I think PV was the recommended a few years ago, but it has now since changed. I would like to change to a HVM to get a bigger selection of instance types, and to use huge pages, which will hopefully give a speed benefit. – Jordan Stewart Sep 14 '16 at 02:25
  • It'd be pretty easy to try HVM. Snapshot the data volume, or if it's on a shared volume run a backup. Create a new volume and a spot instance to try it out. Install the software and give it a go. – Tim Sep 14 '16 at 02:32
  • Your right, I should try it right. I didn't know about spot instance (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/). – Jordan Stewart Sep 14 '16 at 05:40
  • Even a standard on demand instance is relatively cheap to experiment with for short periods, but spot instances can be super cheap as they use excess capacity. Main problem is they can terminate with 2 minutes notice, and the notice is subtle - altering instance metadata, which is not difficult to check if you know where to look. – Tim Sep 14 '16 at 07:00

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