Transparent Huge Pages, or why DBAs are great

Here at Motus, we have a pretty cyclical traffic pattern.  Most of the month our load is pretty even, and then for 4 days a month, our traffic goes up 10x.  And when 3 of those 4 days are holidays, that 4th day is even busier.  We noticed this month that our database server was having to work a little harder than usual, and so we decided to do a little query tuning exercise.