diff --git a/include/haproxy/compiler.h b/include/haproxy/compiler.h
index c18331962..72557674c 100644
--- a/include/haproxy/compiler.h
+++ b/include/haproxy/compiler.h
@@ -88,6 +88,9 @@
 
 #endif // USE_OBSOLETE_LINKER
 
+/* use this attribute on a variable to move it to the read_mostly section */
+#define __read_mostly           HA_SECTION("read_mostly")
+
 /* This allows gcc to know that some locations are never reached, for example
  * after a longjmp() in the Lua code, hence that some errors caught by such
  * methods cannot propagate further. This is important with gcc versions 6 and
diff --git a/src/haproxy.c b/src/haproxy.c
index 407ce424d..3d5e85f16 100644
--- a/src/haproxy.c
+++ b/src/haproxy.c
@@ -135,6 +135,16 @@
 /* array of init calls for older platforms */
 DECLARE_INIT_STAGES;
 
+/* create a read_mostly section to hold variables which are accessed a lot
+ * but which almost never change. The purpose is to isolate them in their
+ * own cache lines where they don't risk to be perturbated by write accesses
+ * to neighbor variables. We need to create an empty aligned variable for
+ * this. The fact that the variable is of size zero means that it will be
+ * eliminated at link time if no other variable uses it, but alignment will
+ * be respected.
+ */
+empty_t __read_mostly_align HA_SECTION("read_mostly") ALIGNED(64);
+
 /* list of config files */
 static struct list cfg_cfgfiles = LIST_HEAD_INIT(cfg_cfgfiles);
 int  pid;			/* current process id */