Hacker News Reader

To support your thought -- https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/for-f...

Since it's not happening to everyone (check the original twitter thread), I'm 100% sure it's third party apps writing in small 4kb chunks with O_DIRECT file opened, therefore creating write amplification effect where 4kb write becomes SSD block size write (for example 4mb), therefore one 4kb write per second, instead of being 0.3GB/day, becomes 345.6GB/day.

View on HN

Can you explain this more? I always thought writes were by the page and erases were by the block, so the scenario you're describing would only be likely with TRIM disabled and an awful garbage collection algorithm.

I could be wrong though because I don't understand the implications of O_DIRECT.

That's an interesting thought. Given the prevalence, I almost wonder if it's a bug in an upstream framework or maybe a crazy default only on M1 Mac's in some language.

Chrome would also be unsurprising. Theyre known for their memory churn already.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com