That's because Unix API used to assume fork() is extremely cheap. Threads were ugly performance hack second-class citizens - still are in some ways. This was indeed true on PDP-11 (just copy a <64KB disk file!), but as address spaces grew, it became prohibitively expensive to copy page tables, so programmers turned to multithreading. At then multicore CPUs became the norm, and multithreading on multicore CPUs meant any kind of copy-on-write required TLB shootdown, making fork() even more expensive. VMS (and its clone known as Windows NT) did it right from the start - processes are just resource containers, units execution are threads and all IO is async. But being technically superior doesn't outweighs the disadvantage of being proprietary.
It's also a pretty bold scheduler benchmark to be handling tens of thousands of processes or 1:1 thread wakeups, especially the further back in time you go considering fairness issues. And then that's running at the wrong latency granularity for fast I/O completion events across that many nodes so it's going to run like a screen door on a submarine without a lot of rethinking things.
Evented I/O works out pretty well in practice for the I and D cache, especially if you can affine and allocate things as the article states, and do similar natural alignments inside the kernel (i.e. RSS/consistent hashing).
Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the possibly. Then the controls come.
> There is abuse. But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand in laptops, monitors and workstations, even with high-end specs,
You would think, but in the age of $6,000 fully specced MacBook Pros, $2,000 monitors, $3,000 standing desks, $1500 iPads with $100 Apple pencils and $300 keyboard cases, $1,000 chairs, SaaS licenses that add up, and (if allowed) food delivery services for “special circumstances” that turns into a regular occurrence it was common to see individuals incurring expenses in the tens of thousands range. It’s hard to believe if you’re a person who moderates their own expenditures.
Some people see a company policy as something meant to be exploited until a hidden limit is reached.
There also starts to be some soft fraud at scales higher than you’d imagine: When someone could get a new laptop without questions, old ones started “getting stolen” at a much higher rate. When we offered food delivery for staying late, a lot of people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.