@phpdeveloper.org
In this post to his site Julien Pauli looks at the concept of "huge pages" and how it relates to some of the behind the scenes work done in PHP 7 to improve memory usage.
Memory paging is a way Operating Systems manage userland process memory. Each process memory access is virtual, and the OS together with the hardware MMU must translate that address into a physical address used to access the data in main memory (RAM).Paging memory is dividing memory in chunks of fixed size, called pages. [...] Why use huge pages? The concept is easy. If we make the OS Kernel use bigger page sizes, that means that more data can be accessed into one single page. That also means that we'll suffer from less TLB miss, once the page translation is stored into the TLB, because one translation will now be valid for more data.
He briefly covers how some updated memory handling and opcode restructuring helps PHP 7 perform even better, especially when it comes to the OPCache handling. He talks about the changes made in the extension specifically to support the "huge pages" idea, complete with code examples (in C) of how this was accomplished.