Hacker News Reader

> I'm acutely aware of how much slowing down a few simple syscalls by just a little bit

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a NAS isn't slowing things down "just a little bit". It'll be more on the order of a million times slower, for those operations.

It's always nice to keep this popular latency table in mind: http://norvig.com/21-days.html#answers

Syscalls are complex beasts, the patches for Meltdown only affect the bit where you transition between userspace and kernel space - this a static cost. Thus, when Avid Media Composer stats a few hundred files on a NAS far, far away from your CPU, the performance cost these patches incur will be negligible.

I would not expect that use case to be affected much. Network latency is too large, relatively speaking, and I don’t think that is “syscall heavy”, even if it does a thousand stat calls.