Enable Kernel Samepage Merging: KSM periodically scans those areas
of an application's address space that an app has advised may be
mergeable. When it finds pages of identical content, it replaces
the many instances by a single resident page with that content, so
saving memory until one or another app needs to modify the content.
Recommended for use with KVM, or with other duplicative applications.
See Documentation/vm/ksm.txt for more information: KSM is inactive
until a program has madvised that an area is MADV_MERGEABLE, and
root has set /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/run to 1 (if CONFIG_SYSFS is set).

source code:

mm/ksm.c