If zone reclaim is switched on, the kernel still attempts to keep the reclaim pass as lightweight as possible. By default, reclaim will be restricted to unmapped page-cache pages. The frequency of reclaim passes can be further reduced by setting /proc/sys/vm/min_unmapped_ratio to the percentage of memory that must contain unmapped pages for the system to run a reclaim pass. The default is 1 percent.

There is a knob in the kernel that determines how the situation is to be treated in /proc/sys/vm/zone_reclaim. A value of 0 means that no local reclaim should take place. A value of 1 tells the kernel that a reclaim pass should be run in order to avoid allocations from the other node. On boot- up a mode is chosen based on the largest NUMA distance in the system.

There has been some recent work in making the scheduler NUMA-aware to ensure that the pages of a process can be moved back to the local node, but that work is available only in Linux 3.8 and later, and is not considered mature.

The active memory allocation policies for all memory segments of a process (and information that shows how much memory was actually allocated from which node) can be seen by determining the process id and then looking at the contents of /proc/<pid>/numa_maps.

How memory is allocated under NUMA is determined by a memory policy. Policies can be specified for memory ranges in a process's address space, or for a process or the system as a whole. Policies for a process override the system policy, and policies for a specific memory range override a process's policy.

The main performance issues typically involve large structures that are accessed frequently by the threads of the application from all memory nodes and that often contain information that needs to be shared among all threads. These are best placed using interleaving so that the objects are distributed over all available nodes.

In general, small Unix tools and small applications work very well with this approach. Large applications that make use of a significant percentage of total system memory and of a majority of the processors on the system will often benefit from explicit tuning or software modifications that take advantage of NUMA.

The most common assumptions made by the operating system are that the application will run on the local node and that memory from the local node is to be preferred.

A NUMA system classifies memory into NUMA nodes (which Solaris calls locality groups).

Modern processors have multiple memory ports, and the latency of access to memory varies depending even on the position of the core on the die relative to the controller. Future generations of processors will have increasing differences in performance as more cores on chip necessitate more sophisticated caching.

A memory access from one socket to memory from another has additional latency overhead to accessing local memory—it requires the traversal of the memory interconnect first.

The performance differences to memory were noticeable first on large-scale systems where data paths were spanning motherboards or chassis. These systems required modified operating-system kernels with NUMA support that explicitly understood the topological properties of the system's memory (such as the chassis in which a region of memory was located) in order to avoid excessively long signal path lengths. (Altix and UV, SGI's large address space systems, are examples. The designers of these products had to modify the Linux kernel to support NUMA; in these machines, processors in multiple chassis are linked via a proprietary interconnect called NUMALINK.)