How many times did you repeat the test? 98% you had a youtube video playing in the background or some full text indexer was running or similar. As for the 2%, I

How many times did you repeat the test? 98% you had a youtube video playing in the background or some full text indexer was running or similar. As for the 2%, I find it hard to believe constantly flushing caches and rejigging page tables on every syscall could ever be faster, but there is always room to be surprised :) The other obvious option since you mention it's a laptop is probably throttling. Worth at least checking dmesg output to see if the kernel logged any events during the run, but I'm not sure that's conclusive. On my Dell it's possible to force fans to 100% through a third party utility, maybe yours supports similar