alt Hacker News> The fact that an idle Mac has over 2,000 threads running in over 600 processes is good news, and the more of those that are run on the E cores, the faster our apps will be
This doesn't make sense in a rather fundamental way - there is no way to design a real computer where doing some useless work is better than doing no work, just think about energy consumption and battery life since this is laptops. Or that's just resources your current app can't use
Besides, they aren't that well engineered, bugs exist and last and come back, etc, so even when on average the impact isn't big, you can get a few photo analysis indexing going haywire for awhile and get stuck
Replies
> (...) where doing some useless work is better than doing no work (...)
This take expresses a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole problem domain. There is a workload comprised of hundreds of processes, some of which multithreaded, that need to be processed. That does not change nor go away. You have absolutely no suggestion that any of those hundreds of processes is "useless". What you will certainly have are processes that will be waiting for IO, but waiting for a request to return a response is not useless.
I would say a good number of those processes/cores are something you don't want running. And you can't turn them off unless you can modify the boot partition to disable the launch configs.
sigh.
> This doesn't make sense in a rather fundamental way - there is no way to design a real compute
Hmm I guess the apple silicon laptops don't exist? Did I dream that I bought one year? Maybe I did - it has been a confusing year.
I think in the example the OP is making, the work is not useless. They're saying if you had a system doing the same work, with maybe 60 processes, you're better off splitting that into 600 processes and a couple thousand threads, since that will allow granular classification of tasks by their latency sensitivity