In the example from the article, the "s_arc" member is a pointer (8 bytes) and requires an alignment at an 8-byte boundary. The ints are 4 bytes in size. The whole struct needs to be aligned on an 8-byte boundary, in order to preserve the alignment requirements of the pointers. The trailing "s_accept" member requires additional padding to make the size of the struct divisible by 8, and that would preserve the alignment of an eventual second adjacent struct, when having an array of these structs.
If you're referring to `__pad2` in the example, that trailing padding is there to ensure that the size of the struct is a multiple of its alignment, which is 8, so that if there's a contiguous span of those structures, each instance after the first one will remained properly aligned. Without `__pad2`, that struct would be 36-bytes, which would cause every other instance in an array/contiguous-span to be aligned on 4 bytes instead of 8.