Linux – Arch Linux becomes unresponsive from khugepaged

arch linuxvmware

I am a heavy VMware workstation 10.0.3 user, and as such I have 32GB RAM on my system. My only operating system is Arch Linux, using Unity for the desktop.

Usually when I have two virtual machines running with about 3GB RAM appointed to each, really often and at random intervals the whole system becomes unresponsive for a few seconds.

Running "top" at a terminal, the culprit seems to be the command khugepaged, which runs while the system is unresponsive at 100% CPU and then dissapears.

Is there any way to avoid this? I have googled about khugepaged, but I only seem to find ancient posts from 2011 or unanswered questions.

These are my full system specs:

  • CPU: Intel i5 4570@3.2GHz
  • 32GB Corsair Vengeance RAM@2400MHz
  • M/B ASrock Z87 Pro 4

Best Answer

I have similar problem on Ubuntu. The workaround I use is:

echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag
echo 0 > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/defrag

The source of the workaround is in a Fedora bug report “khugepaged eating 100%CPU”. The bug was never fixed.

This is less drastic then disabling entire transparent_hugepage support. The detailed explanation of what the command does can be found in the documentation of transparent hugepage support.

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