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I wonder if the inefficiency of the meltdown patches will incentivize cloud providers to lower the price of large instances that have a high CPU core count (rel

I wonder if the inefficiency of the meltdown patches will incentivize cloud providers to lower the price of large instances that have a high CPU core count (relative to small instances with low core count). At the moment, the price of instances goes up linearly relative to CPU core count - Maybe in part because the performance overhead of virtualizing a single 32-core machine into 16 2-core machines had been minimal. But now that the performance overhead of virtualisation is higher (due to isolating the CPU cores being more expensive), maybe it's more efficient to lease entire CPUs (with all of their cores) without the patch (and associated overheads).

tedunangst 9y ago
If performance is better, why would they charge less instead of more? Why apply the discount to the more desirable product?
- bobwaycott 9y ago
  My initial guess would be to align pricing with expected performance, which has now degraded, right? I don’t expect it to happen, but I can see customers like myself being unhappy with paying—just for example—for an 8-core VPS whose performance now matches what previously was 4-core performance. So, I don’t think anyone would expect them to charge less for a higher core count than lower core count, but adjusting prices downward to match performance wouldn’t be upsetting.
  - jondubois 9y ago
    Yes exactly. To clarify my point; this vulnerability only affects you if you're sharing a physical machine/CPU with other users (isolated by a virtualization layer)... So if you choose not to share your physical machines/CPUs with other users then you are not exposed to that vulnerability and ideally you also shouldn't need to get these patches and their associated performance overheads. Virtualization already has some known minor performance overheads but now these patches will add even more overheads. Can cloud providers keep pretending that 4x 2-core virtual instances are as performant as a single physical 8-core instance?

tedunangst 9y ago

If performance is better, why would they charge less instead of more? Why apply the discount to the more desirable product?

bobwaycott 9y ago
My initial guess would be to align pricing with expected performance, which has now degraded, right? I don’t expect it to happen, but I can see customers like myself being unhappy with paying—just for example—for an 8-core VPS whose performance now matches what previously was 4-core performance. So, I don’t think anyone would expect them to charge less for a higher core count than lower core count, but adjusting prices downward to match performance wouldn’t be upsetting.
- jondubois 9y ago
  Yes exactly. To clarify my point; this vulnerability only affects you if you're sharing a physical machine/CPU with other users (isolated by a virtualization layer)... So if you choose not to share your physical machines/CPUs with other users then you are not exposed to that vulnerability and ideally you also shouldn't need to get these patches and their associated performance overheads. Virtualization already has some known minor performance overheads but now these patches will add even more overheads. Can cloud providers keep pretending that 4x 2-core virtual instances are as performant as a single physical 8-core instance?