Comment by ninkendo
7 years ago
Not that I'd recommend this, but my work MBP has 16GB of ram, and my typical software development setup (JVM, IntelliJ, Xcode, gradle) easily uses up 30GB. It swaps a lot but generally OSX does a good job of keeping the window manager and foreground applications at priority so I can still use my machine while this is happening.
I attribute this to the fact that the darwin kernel has a keen awareness of what threads directly affect the user interface and which do not (even including the handling of XPC calls across process boundaries... if your work drives the UI, you get scheduling/RAM priority). I don't think the linux kernel has nearly this level of awareness.
> ... the darwin kernel has a keen awareness of what threads directly affect the user interface and which do not (even including the handling of XPC calls across process boundaries... if your work drives the UI, you get scheduling/RAM priority). I don't think the linux kernel has nearly this level of awareness.
You're talking about priority inheritance in the kernel. In Linux, this is in development as part of the PREEMPT_RT ("real-time") patches, already available experimentally in a number of distributions.