If you add up an optimisation of just a nanosecond in like openSSH, how much would that do globally?
Makes me wonder whether this alternate major release cycle was a good idea. If you delay all feature development for a year, you'll get a barrage of features once the performance-only OS version is out the door, and there's not enough time to do all of them properly, so you get buggy and slow versions.
Maybe doing performance improvements and feature development at the same time would have been the better choice? How is it being done at Apple nowadays?
I believed optimizations like that at a global scale will not have any impact.
Lets say that this nanosecond will be saved trillions of time a day. Resulting in minutes to an hour a day saved globally.
* Not a single user will notice. * In 99.99% of cases the CPU will not be fully pegged and thus that one nanosecond of compute will not be used to do something else at all. * CPU throttling isn't that fast so, you won't even save that much power.
If we bump it up by 6 orders of magnitude to a millisecond that all remains true. Even though you are potentially saving 100s of years of computing time a day. Extremely small gains distributed across very large number of machines don't tend to be as impactful as you would hope on a global scale.
This is not to say that small gains are worthless. Many small gains added together can be substantial.
But aren't we talking about extremely mature kernel code here? My impression is that all kernel distros in high use are optimized but they are general use software. The degree to which you may optimize software is constrained but the diversity of use cases you must support.