That said, the case isn't as obvious as you make it: you apparently save on copies and explicit system calls, but mmap replaces those with page table manipulation and "hidden" system calls (i.e., page faults).

These page faults have as much per-call overhead as regular system calls, and so if mmap actually faulted in every page, I'm pretty sure it would actually be slower than read(), since read with a 16K buffer (for example) would make only 25% as many syscalls as mmap bringing in every 4K page.

On modern Linux, by default, mmap doesn't fault in every page, due to "faultaround" which tries to map in additional nearby pages every time it faults (16 by default), so the number of faults is 1/16th what you'd expect if it faulted on every page. You can avoid additional mapping on access with MAP_POPULATE or madvise (? maybe) calls, but then this introduces the same kind of window management problem as read: you lose the abstraction of the entire file just mapped into memory.

Beyond that, mmap has to do "per page" work to map the file: adjusting VM and OS structures to map the page into the process address space, and then undoing that work on munmap (which is the more expensive half since it includes TLB invalidation, and possibly a cross-core shootdown). You'd thing that this work would be much faster than copying 4 KiB of memory, but it isn't - and on some systems with small pages sizes and/or slow TLB invalidations it can be slower overall.

> It should be faster in nearly all circumstances

As my previous comment showed, that's definitely not true. If you're searching a whole bunch of small files in a short period of time, then it appears that the overhead of memory mapping leads to a significant performance regression when compared to standard `read` calls.

> it’s really the easy case

I know. :-) That's why ripgrep has both modes. It chooses between them based on the predicted workload. It uses memory maps automatically if it's searching a file or two, but otherwise falls back to standard read calls.

Moreover, if ripgrep aborts once in a while because of a SIGBUS, then it's usually not a big deal. It's fairly rare for it to happen. And if it does happen to you a lot or you never want it to happen, then you just need to `alias rg="rg --no-mmap"`.

I was pondering this some more in the shower, the mmap for rg case is also sort of naturally cache oblivious, copies will consume hardware cache for the write and while there is a ton of hardware for cache on modern hardware, it’s a noticeable cost on some tests. If you’re searching through something big, then it’d be like doubling hardware cache which is probably really noticeable on smaller devices.

The small files case is interesting, copying the data is faster than patching up the page table tree, I bet there is a strong correlation to the hardware cache size vs the average file size in that case. The files probably need to be N pages in size for it to be worth it, might be an interesting heuristic to use.

But for general production case mmap shouldn't even be considered a solution to the syscall and memory copy overhead problem. If that overhead is too big for you, other approaches work better, like buffering, application level caching, etc.

Buffering and application level caching mean you're wasting memory, and also wasting code space and CPU time because you're duplicating work that the OS already does.