While investigating some performance mysteries in Chrome I discovered that Microsoft had parallelized how they zero memory, and in some cases this was making it a lot slower. This slowdown may be mitigated in Windows 11 but in the latest Windows Server editions – where it matters most – this bug is alive and well.
The good news is that this issue seems to only apply to machines with a lot of processors. By “a lot” of processors I mean probably 96 or more. So, your laptop is fine. And, even the 96-processor machines may not hit this problem all the time. But I’ve now found four different ways to trigger this inefficiency and when it is hit – oh my. The CPU power wasted is impressive – I estimate that memory zeroing is using about 24x the CPU time it should.
Okay – time for the details.
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