How to setup huge pages on a postgreSQL server

The Postgres Documentation states:

The use of huge pages results in smaller page tables and less CPU time spent on memory management, increasing performance.

This is how I set up huge pages on one of my postgreSQL servers.

First, check the server's huge page size. My huge pages are 2M each:

 grep Hugepagesize /proc/meminfo
Hugepagesize:       2048 kB

On my 16G server, I would like to start with 25% of the total memory as available for shared_buffers:

su - postgres
sudo systemctl stop postgresql-15.service
postgres --shared-buffers=4096MB -D $PGDATA -C shared_memory_size_in_huge_pages
2102

Update /etc/sysctl.conf. Add

vm.nr_hugepages=2102

Restart sysctl

sysctl -p

Now, tell the postgres server to use huge pages, if they are available.

Add the following directive to the config file postgresql.conf

huge_pages = try

Add the following lines to /etc/security/limits.conf so that postgres can lock down the memory set aside for huge tables:

postgres soft memlock unlimited
postgres hard memlock unlimited

Reboot the server and verify that huge pages are being used:

cat /proc/meminfo | grep Huge

Interestingly, the parameter huge_page_size should only be used if you wish to override the default huge page size on your system. The default is zero (0). When set to 0, the default huge page size on the system will be used. In my case this is what I want to so the parameter can be ignored.