[dpdk-dev] A question about hugepage initialization time

[Matt Laswell <laswell@infiniteio.com>]

Hey Folks,

Our DPDK application deals with very large in memory data structures, and
can potentially use tens or even hundreds of gigabytes of hugepage memory.
During the course of development, we've noticed that as the number of huge
pages increases, the memory initialization time during EAL init gets to be
quite long, lasting several minutes at present.  The growth in init time
doesn't appear to be linear, which is concerning.

This is a minor inconvenience for us and our customers, as memory
initialization makes our boot times a lot longer than it would otherwise
be.  Also, my experience has been that really long operations often are
hiding errors - what you think is merely a slow operation is actually a
timeout of some sort, often due to misconfiguration. This leads to two
questions:

1. Does the long initialization time suggest that there's an error
happening under the covers?
2. If not, is there any simple way that we can shorten memory
initialization time?

Thanks in advance for your insights.

--
Matt Laswell
laswell@infiniteio.com
infinite io, inc.