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Comment by AaronFriel | Hacker News Reader

> Our testing with public benchmarks has shown that the changes in the December 2017 updates resulted in no measurable reduction in the performance of macOS and iOS as measured by the GeekBench 4 benchmark, or in common Web browsing benchmarks such as Speedometer, JetStream, and ARES-6.

This is incredibly deceptive, because web workloads are precisely the sort not expected to be impacted by Meltdown most. As I've written elsewhere, it's syscall heavy workloads targeting fast devices, like database software on PCIe SSDs, that will suffer the greatest slowdowns.

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This spells certain doom for Apple’s vaunted supremacy in supplying high-performance hardware for database usage.

Why? Is their competition not affected?

the /s at the end is silent

you made my day :)

Ha, I thought I was on /r/apple

> it's syscall heavy workloads targeting fast devices, like database software on PCIe SSDs, that will suffer the greatest slowdowns.

That's not exactly a common scenario for macOS, much less iOS devices.

It's fair to call for benchmarks that are more representative of common workloads, not less representative.

Avid Media Composer, one of the most popular non-linear video editors in the industry, does a stat of every piece of media referenced in every project you have open when you change focus from another application back to Avid Media Composer.

Since I work on network attached storage for video editing, I'm acutely aware of how much slowing down a few simple syscalls by just a little bit can be for certain very commonly used applications on macOS.

> I'm acutely aware of how much slowing down a few simple syscalls by just a little bit

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a NAS isn't slowing things down "just a little bit". It'll be more on the order of a million times slower, for those operations.

It's always nice to keep this popular latency table in mind: http://norvig.com/21-days.html#answers

I would not expect that use case to be affected much. Network latency is too large, relatively speaking, and I don’t think that is “syscall heavy”, even if it does a thousand stat calls.

Syscalls are complex beasts, the patches for Meltdown only affect the bit where you transition between userspace and kernel space - this a static cost. Thus, when Avid Media Composer stats a few hundred files on a NAS far, far away from your CPU, the performance cost these patches incur will be negligible.

This patch was released on December 6th, and there haven't been reports of decreased performance from scientific/video editing/etc folks. The worst-case workloads are probably not happening on macOS anyway.

Apple, like intel, is a hardware vendor. They are better off ignoring the performance impairment than recognizing it. Both because of potential litigation costs* and because the performance impact could shift customers away.

*Edit: Also potential reimbursements/compensations and manageing them.

Edit2: What if customers decided to return en mase their new iphone X or macbook they got for christmas?

Or, far more likely, and more importantly _actually the case here_, the performance impact for most common macOS workloads is likely to be negligible.

Not everything is a conspiracy theory.

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