Channeling my inner Linux, defaulting to larger pages means a drastic loss in memory efficiency when mmaping lots of small files as happens when someone compiles the Linux kernel. If you've got a 2kb file and 4kb pages then half the memory you allocate when the file is paged in is wasted. For larger pages that goes way up.
Absolutely, but you also want a different scheduler for a low-latency server than you do for your desktop.
One size almost never fits all, as I’m sure you’ll agree as someone who cares about compiling the kernel.
With that said, the kernel is pretty good at reclaiming physical pages, so you’d most likely eat into the same disk cache you’re reading from in the scenario you’ve described.
