A set of patches being worked on by Oracle engineers allow for optionally sharing page table entries (PTEs) between processes. For some workloads this can equate to very significant memory savings.

The patches being worked on by Oracle engineers introduce a new in-memory file-system (MSHAREFS) and allow for optionally sharing page table entries between processes. With certain classes of workloads, this can mean very significant memory savings – huge savings in fact as noted in the patch cover letter after Oracle realized this memory overhead in actual use on a database server.