4 ms·

More than a doubling of CPU use, but for consistency's sake: The other percentages we've been offered have been in terms of performance reduction. We were told

More than a doubling of CPU use, but for consistency's sake: The other percentages we've been offered have been in terms of performance reduction. We were told to expect a range of 5-30%; this is about 60%. Somewhere a sysadmin's hair has started smoldering.

metaobject 9y ago
I’d go farther, anybody who is concerned with application performance may soon see/smell their hair smoldering. We write a lot of code that needs to run as fast as possible (processing, post-processing, generating real-time weather/satellite data) and I’m concerned about time windows and whether we’ll be able to meet requirements.
- bsenftner 9y ago
  Meltdown is aptly named, as that is what's gonna happen to the global corporate services market, "efficiently" hosted in the cloud and scraping for profitability.
- nine_k 9y ago
  I suppose these guys just don't apply the patch. They are not running in a public cloud with potentially hostile neighboring VMs; they run their own trusted code. They might choose to tighten perimeter security instead, in the short term.
- toast0 9y ago
  Data processing where number crunching is the key problem may not be affected much. Data processing where fetching and assembling the data from many sources is likely to see larger slowdowns. Pure communications workloads are also likely to see larger slowdowns.
- rdtsc 9y ago
  For pure computational cases Meltdown vulnerability remediation might not impact you as much. Meltdown fixes would affect applications that do a lot of syscalls - lots of socket IO, IPC stuff, small and frequent disk IO ops etc. You'll probably see a wide variety of benchmark results anything from no impact to things like above. So just make sure you measure carefully with your own workload.
forgotpw2018 9y ago
Intel's PR dept is in overdrive, but the truth about this vulnerability is that it's essentially worst-case. It really only affects workloads where high performance is important. The average user might not see an impact but if you need fast IO God help you. The solution is to 'make less syscalls' but the problem is that syscalls have always been slow and the people making a lot of them are only doing so because they absolutely have to
- Waterluvian 9y ago
  Isn't that like saying that it turns out this car we sold can only do 150, not 200. But it's okay because most of you never drive above 80 anyways. You're right. Most people who just surf the Netflix and download the YouTubes will not notice. But it's still a form of fraud, even to those who never max out CPU. I think fraud is a strong word knowing that this wasn't intentional. But they sold a lesser product than they advertised and need to make customers whole. Otherwise it pretty much is fraud.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
    - mistercow 9y ago
      Is that remotely feasible? You're basically suggesting that Intel needs to refund or replace every PC and server CPU they've sold in the last five years. The fdiv recall cost Intel almost half a billion dollars, and that was for a small subset of processors that most people didn't replace. Intel has a lot of assets, but replacing five years worth of CPUs might actually bankrupt them.
      - forgotpw2018 9y ago
        I deleted that because I thought it was too flamey after reading it again, but yeah refunding everyone is unrealistic. Maybe just average out the performance impact across large cloud providers and offer that as a percentage? It probably wouldn't be hard for a company like Google to crunch metrics before/after the update and give a number for how much their performance has been affected

metaobject 9y ago

I’d go farther, anybody who is concerned with application performance may soon see/smell their hair smoldering. We write a lot of code that needs to run as fast as possible (processing, post-processing, generating real-time weather/satellite data) and I’m concerned about time windows and whether we’ll be able to meet requirements.

bsenftner 9y ago
Meltdown is aptly named, as that is what's gonna happen to the global corporate services market, "efficiently" hosted in the cloud and scraping for profitability.
nine_k 9y ago
I suppose these guys just don't apply the patch. They are not running in a public cloud with potentially hostile neighboring VMs; they run their own trusted code. They might choose to tighten perimeter security instead, in the short term.
toast0 9y ago
Data processing where number crunching is the key problem may not be affected much. Data processing where fetching and assembling the data from many sources is likely to see larger slowdowns. Pure communications workloads are also likely to see larger slowdowns.
rdtsc 9y ago
For pure computational cases Meltdown vulnerability remediation might not impact you as much. Meltdown fixes would affect applications that do a lot of syscalls - lots of socket IO, IPC stuff, small and frequent disk IO ops etc. You'll probably see a wide variety of benchmark results anything from no impact to things like above. So just make sure you measure carefully with your own workload.

forgotpw2018 9y ago

Intel's PR dept is in overdrive, but the truth about this vulnerability is that it's essentially worst-case. It really only affects workloads where high performance is important. The average user might not see an impact but if you need fast IO God help you. The solution is to 'make less syscalls' but the problem is that syscalls have always been slow and the people making a lot of them are only doing so because they absolutely have to

Waterluvian 9y ago
Isn't that like saying that it turns out this car we sold can only do 150, not 200. But it's okay because most of you never drive above 80 anyways. You're right. Most people who just surf the Netflix and download the YouTubes will not notice. But it's still a form of fraud, even to those who never max out CPU. I think fraud is a strong word knowing that this wasn't intentional. But they sold a lesser product than they advertised and need to make customers whole. Otherwise it pretty much is fraud.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
  - mistercow 9y ago
    Is that remotely feasible? You're basically suggesting that Intel needs to refund or replace every PC and server CPU they've sold in the last five years. The fdiv recall cost Intel almost half a billion dollars, and that was for a small subset of processors that most people didn't replace. Intel has a lot of assets, but replacing five years worth of CPUs might actually bankrupt them.
    - forgotpw2018 9y ago
      I deleted that because I thought it was too flamey after reading it again, but yeah refunding everyone is unrealistic. Maybe just average out the performance impact across large cloud providers and offer that as a percentage? It probably wouldn't be hard for a company like Google to crunch metrics before/after the update and give a number for how much their performance has been affected