page tables

A new technical write-up examines how much physical memory page tables consume in modern computer systems, breaking down the overhead that virtual memory translation structures add on top of applications' actual memory use. Readers on Hacker News are discussing the analysis, trading notes on measurement methods and comparing the figures with their own experience running memory-heavy workloads.

The 2026 Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, will feature cricket, and fans are tracking match scores, results, group standings and the medal winners list as the tournament approaches. Reference pages compile fixtures, points tables and results in one place, reflecting growing interest in cricket's place at the multi-sport event ahead of the games.

A discussion of memory management arithmetic is making the rounds: a 4 KiB data page requires only 8 bytes of page table entry, a ratio of 1 to 512. When a page is mapped just once in an address space, page table overhead amounts to roughly 1/512 of mapped memory, a figure programmers find striking.