Admins start noticing performance impact of Intel Meltdown patch

The Register reports sysadmins around the world are starting to notice performance hits due to the rollout of the patch for the Meltdown vulnerability that's found in all modern Intel processors. The fix adds extra overhead, slows down systems and increases power consumption.

Early tests show the impact is minimal for average PC users and gamers but for server clients the effects are larger. Here are some comments from sysadmins from the Amazon AWS support forums:

"Immediately following the reboot my server running on this instance started to suffer from CPU stress," one admin noted after enabling the patch.

"Looking at CPU stats there was a very clear change in daily CPU usage pattern, despite continuing normal traffic to my server. I performed extensive review of what might have changed on my server configuration but drew a complete blank - configuration of the server did not change."

Another added: "This just happened to us today on a c3.large. The cost to us to move the platform to new hardware and the lost confidence from our customers is huge."

Impact of the patch for the Intel bug on my AWS EC2 instances running Linux, a t1.micro and m3.medium. #KPTI pic.twitter.com/n3uZsZ38iV

— Tim Gostony (@timgostony) January 3, 2018

Clearly, we haven't heard the last from this.