Bitcoin full node and query server

Oct 12, 2025

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evoskuil17:47

This Big Mac is a BEAST and yet it gets sluggish with almost no resource utilization.

Based on your description (low CPU, 700GB free RAM, but system-wide sluggishness during large mmap operations on APFS), this isn't a RAM/CPU bottleneck but likely a kernel-level virtual memory (VM) issue tied to macOS's handling of massive shared mappings. Even with free physical RAM, mmap reserves virtual address space upfront, and on APFS, lazy page faults for large files (e.g., your 92G+ mappings) can cause thrashing or fragmentation, leading to system-wide I/O stalls or thermal throttling without spiking CPU. This matches reports of similar "ghost" slowdowns where Activity Monitor looks fine, but the kernel is busy with metadata/VM ops.