Why does mongodb complain about transparent_hugepage?

Question

A few questions are already asking about how to fix the mongodb warning:

** WARNING: /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag is 'always.'
**        We suggest setting it to 'never'

But I'm wondering if it should be fixed. I get this warning from MongoDB 3.0.1 on a Ubuntu VM running on Google's Cloud. Should I trust MongoDB that 'never' is better? Or should I trust Google/Ubuntu that they set it to 'always' for a good reason? I imagine there are tradeoffs to be considered and don't know what I'd be trading to keep it or fix it.

Asking how to fix it is fine, but asking whether to fix it seems wiser.

Answer 1

Edit: Mongodb have addressed this issue since I wrote this answer. Their recommendation is at https://docs.mongodb.com/master/tutorial/transparent-huge-pages/ and probably ought to be your go-to solution. My original answer will still work, but I'd consider it a hack now that an official solution is available.

Original answer: According to the MongoDB documentation, http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/transparent-huge-pages/, and support, https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/DOCS-2131, transparent_hugepage (THP) is designed to create fewer large memory blocks rather than many small memory blocks in systems with a lot of memory. This is great if your software needs large contiguous memory accesses. For MongoDB, however, regardless of memory available, it requires numerous smaller memory accesses and therefore performs better with THP disabled.

That makes me think either way will work, but you'll get better mongo (or any database) performance with THP off, giving you smaller bites of memory. If you don't have much memory anyway, THP probably ought to be off no matter what you run.

Several ways to do that are outlined in the link above. The most universally applicable appears to be editing rc.local.

$ sudo nano /etc/rc.local

Insert the following lines before the "exit 0" line.

...
if test -f /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/defrag; then
  echo 0 > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/defrag
fi
if test -f /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag; then
  echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag
fi
if test -f /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled; then
  echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
fi
exit 0

Note: redhat-based systems may use "redhat_transparent_hugepage" rather than "transparent_hugepage" and can be checked by:

ls /sys/kernel/mm/*transparent_hugepage*/enabled
cat /sys/kernel/mm/*transparent_hugepage*/enabled

To apply the changes, reboot (which will run rc.local) or:

$ sudo su
# source /etc/rc.local
# service mongod restart
# exit

to properly apply the changes made above