Annie Ghazali follows up on a Chris Travers webinar:
Q1. At what point we need to focus on ensuring huge_pages in PostgreSQL?
There are a couple of factors here. The first is, that if you’re able to show that you have multiple NUMA domains, it will almost always be a win performance-wise. But it becomes critical at the point where you start seeing that the checkpointer is running at 100 percent CPU load, and none of your queries are running at 100 percent CPU load, especially if you don’t have a lot of IO weight. That’s a really good indication that you’ve hit a point where it’s now a heavy bottleneck, and that’s a point where it’s starting to become something where you’re going to see a very large win out of it.
Read on to see this full answer, as well as answers to questions around why you might not want to disable NUMA support and what NUMA does to swap space recommendations.