I wish Windows was different in that regard. On Windows, large pages are borderline unusable. They need special security privilege SeLockMemoryPrivilege, since

I wish Windows was different in that regard. On Windows, large pages are borderline unusable. They need special security privilege SeLockMemoryPrivilege, since vista introduced UAC most processes don't have that privilege. Windows is unwilling to page large pages to disk, easy to fail with out of memory errors. I don't think there's a good reason for that: it's much faster to load 2MB from disk on modern computer, then it was to load 4kb from disk on i386.