That was kind of what sprung to my mind as well. Since I'm not really familiar with the mitigations or their low-level details, I wouldn't be able to speculate

That was kind of what sprung to my mind as well. Since I'm not really familiar with the mitigations or their low-level details, I wouldn't be able to speculate on what kinds of factors might cause the performance effects to vary randomly depending on specific circumstances, though. Kind of like it turns out that the performance effects of various compiler optimizations can vary a lot depending on the exact memory layout of the compiled program, which might vary from one compiler version to another or due to minor changes to the program code. If you want generalizable results, the proper way to benchmark might be to test with multiple random layouts [1]. I don't know if there could be similar potential side effects from vulnerability mitigations that might cause their performance effects to vary in an effectively random way. Perhaps the mitigations are different enough to not vary so much. I don't really know. But the question kind of unavoidably comes to mind. [1] https://emeryberger.com/research/stabilizer/ https://emeryberger.com/research/stabilizer/