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

For those running the Redis in-memory database, on Linux 4.19 with the Intel hardware there is a performance hit of up to 11% observed on the Intel Skylake E3 v5 system while for the other hardware was 5~7% lower. On the AMD EPYC systems this was 1~5%.

When running the NGINX web server, the performance impact on the tested Xeon systems with the Linux 4.19 kernel was up to 20% while on the AMD EPYC systems was just 1~2% of 6% on the EPYC virtual machine.

Likewise, with the Apache HTTP web server was also noticeably lower out-of-the-box performance on the Xeon hardware while the EPYC bare metal performance was unchanged and the EPYC VM just a few percent lower in its default configuration.