Recently, on my other blog accidentallyquadratic, I documented a case of accidentally quadratic behavior in /proc/$pid/maps on a wide range of recent Linux kernels. While this bug is amusing, it might initially not seem that important; /proc/$pid/maps is primarily a debugging or inspection tool, and while 30s access times aren’t pleasant, they probably aren’t breaking anything too critical. Today I want to explore, by way of some microbenchmarks, the more pernicious impact of that bug. I ...
