Disabling Transparent Huge Pages in CentOS7

The THP (Transparent Huge Pages) feature of modern LINUX kernels is a boon for on-metal servers with a sufficiently advanced MMU. However they can also result in performance degradation and inefficiently memory use when enabled in a virtual machine [depending on the hypervisor and hosting provider]. See, for example "Use of large pages can cause memory to be fully allocated". If you are issues in a virtualized environment that point towards unexplained memory consumption it may be worthwhile to experiment with disabling THP in your guests. These are instructions for controlling the THP feature through the use of a SystemD unit.

Create the file /etc/systemd/system/disable-thp.service:

[Unit]
Description=Disable Transparent Huge Pages (THP)
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/bin/sh -c "echo 'never' > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled && echo 'never' > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag"
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable the new unit:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start disable-thp
sudo systemctl enable disable-thp

THP will now be disabled. However already allocated huge pages are still active. Rebooting the server is advised to bring up the services with THP disabled.