Way back in 2010, MySQL Bug 57241 was filed, pointing out that the “swap insanity” problem was getting serious on x86 systems – with NUMA being more and more common back then.
The swapping problem is due to running out of memory on a NUMA node and having to swap things to other nodes (see Jeremy Cole‘s blog entry also from 2010 on the topic of swap insanity). This was back when 64GB and dual quad core CPUs was big – in the past five years big systems have gotten bigger.
Back then there were two things you could do to have your system be usable: 1) numa=off as kernel boot parameter (this likely has other implications though) and 2) “numactl –interleave all” in mysqld_safe …
[Read more]