NUMA Programming

Purpose

Guide agents through NUMA-aware programming: topology detection with numactl and sysfs, libnuma API (numa_alloc_onnode, mbind, set_mempolicy), process binding with numactl, NUMA-aware data structures, remote access diagnosis with perf stat, and lstopo visualization.

When to Use

• Multi-socket server shows poor scaling despite low CPU utilization
• Memory bandwidth saturation on one NUMA node
• Binding database or cache process to local memory
• Designing per-node freelists or sharded allocators
• Measuring remote vs local memory access latency
• Tuning HPC, DPDK, or custom allocator for socket locality

Workflow

1. Topology detection