The Performance Cost Of Spectre / Meltdown / Foreshadow Mitigations On Linux 4.19

The Hackbench Linux kernel scheduler benchmark tends to show an impact from these mitigations as well. On the Intel hardware was a performance hit of around 20% except for an outlier in the bare metal dual Xeon Gold results. On the AMD EPYC systems there was no real performance penalty incurred from its relevant Spectre mitigations.

The PostgreSQL database server is one of the real-world workloads we've seen incurring performance hits this year as the various speculative execution vulnerabilities are mitigated. In this particular test run today, the Intel CPUs with mitigations applied were running at 93~95% the speed of an unmitigated kernel while the EPYC CPUs were at 99%.

The GIMP image manipulation program is another one of the programs we've seen where performance penalties can be incurred due to Spectre/Meltdown. On the Intel side it generally meant a 5~10% drop in performance while on the AMD EPYC systems was 0~2%.