Comment by forrestthewoods
7 hours ago
> Could you clarify why there shouldn't be an OS difference?
Ignoring mmap. But why on a 16gb system why would performance degrade at 1Gb? You shouldn’t be hitting the swap. So any differences should be hardware architecture related. M1 unified vs Ryzen. And I wouldn’t expect 1Gb to be a magic threshold.
I would definitely expect a threshold beyond 16gb. And I’d expect the swap to come into play at maybe 12gb. I wouldn’t expect a huge difference between 500mb and 8gb. Ok there’s probability difference of hitting the L3 cache. But most of those random accesses will be hitting system RAM so it should be the same.
Could be wrong! But that’s what I’d expect.
Ohh you're right thanks, I mixed up which part of the post you were talking about; sorry for getting confused.
Yes, I agree that it doesn't make sense for that to be due to the OS. That's just poor writing on my part: in that case I wasn't actually trying to imply that it was due to the operating system specifically, I was just using "Linux" and "the MacBook" as shorthand to refer to my two different computers, which differ in more ways than just the OS. In this case, another commenter suggested it might be due to my physical setup of having three RAM sticks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397214
So yes, in that sentence I should have written "on my desktop" instead of just "on Linux".