I declare this the last posting in this venue on whether Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system does or does not support the use of "huge pages" in memory addressing, as laid out previously in Holiday Update #3 here. But for completeness, I offer this report from the other side of the operating system divide:
"I'm a Software Engineer at Microsoft. Apple's smart enough to see how little use 4MB pages are and I doubt they will ever implement support any time soon.
"Huge pages hurt when the other factors at play are accounted for like memory fragmentation, additional memory used, cost of reading in 4 MB at a time from the disk. I think this has been tested on IA64 servers with huge amount of ram and it hurt not helped."
Let's add this to the list of "how big is the universe"-style endlessly debatable questions.
So many more updates, so few remaining holiday weekend hours.
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James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. He and his wife, Deborah Fallows, are the authors of the new book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, which has been a New York Times best-seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary.