[drbawb]

I read this blog post[1] a while back about the Windows memory subsystem performing pathologically bad due to an application (Google Chrome) asking the OS to employ memory throttling, and then blowing past its own self-imposed limits. I had a bit of a chuckle because I've literally run into, and complained about this before, so getting to see how silly it was under-the-hood was great schadenfreude.

These "background-friendly" processes are a sick joke IMO. My experience is they are wasting more power trying to play these stupid games, because by increasing the wall-time it takes to finish their workload, all they really achieve is keeping the CPU in a frequency-boosted state longer than necessary.

Just go fast and let the scheduler throttle you. If the browser updater is making a user-interactive system fall over: their code needs to be better, and the OS kernel needs to be better. If you are doing too much work the answer is "do less work" not "load-smear the frankly ludicrous amount of CPU and I/O." I think it's very indicative of how far desktop software has fallen that people seem to think adding more complexity (in the form of user-mode scheduling) is going to dig them out of the performance hole they dug themselves into.

[1]: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/32-mib-working-...