Thank you for clarifying, and I apologise as I also became quite hostile. I agree that we agree on many points; but I think where we diverge (and perhaps funda

Thank you for clarifying, and I apologise as I also became quite hostile. I agree that we agree on many points; but I think where we diverge (and perhaps fundamentally) is in the base assumption that "because google uses it, it must be the best, because even if it wasn't google would make it so" (at least, this is my interpretation of GPs comment). I have little doubt that the low hanging... mid hanging and perhaps even most of the high-hanging fruit has been well and truly plucked when it comes to linux throughput at the behest of the large tech companies; because a few percent improvement translates a lot at their scale. -- However I am reminded of an allegory given in a talk (that I can't find) regarding bowling. In the talk the speaker mentions how they got "really good" at bowling with completely the wrong technique; but it worked for them, up to a point in which they could not improve no matter what they did. They had to go back to the basics and learn proper technique and become much worse before they were able to overtake their previous scores with the bad technique.... but after that point there were further improvements to be had. My argument that this is the case is merely: doing an architectural re-write of the linux kernel to be more scalable in the way FreeBSD's is would be very punishing for too many people, and additionally that the economics are not favourable when, if you do get to a point where you cannot scale due to the kernel, you could just break out into userland. -- then simply suffer the adequate but not insane performance everywhere else where it's not needed anyway. So, to summarise my points: * Because a big company uses something does not mean it is perfect in all areas * That Linux has a lot of attention on it does not mean necessarily that it has the most potential: though I don't doubt that the majority of it's potential has been reached. * Diminishing returns means once it's "good enough" people will try to get performance elsewhere if they need it. * Rewriting the network stack in Linux completely would likely be harmful to many and subtly so, I haven't seen people moving towards this idea either, this feels like it could be political as well as technical. * Hyperscalers will often trade convenience over performance: regardless, CPU time is much cheaper for them than it is for us.