Re:GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
by floxy on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @09:07PM
(#49191151)
So for an I/O heavy program like a web browser, what percentage of CPU time is spent in syscalls? Someone must have that data for Firefox. 1%? 10%? And then that moves to 1.1% (or 11%)? And then every other program is even less affected? Curious if anyone is in the know.
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It depends on the OS, some OS have some way to do IO that gets around that. iouring or things like that. I don't know how Hurd does IO.
Most microkernals have methods to do IO in a different way. If they don't then likely they would pretty slow when doing I/O heavy operations.
Firefox isn’t io bound it is spending a ton of CPU parsing network buffers and rendering UI.
Nginx is IO bound in general - for my headless go stateful server, i could get syscall6 up to 20% of the profile time. It was a fight between GC in the gRPC code allocating for headers and the syscall6 for top single profile footprint.