The Performance Impact To POWER9's Eager L1d Cache Flushing Fix

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 25 November 2020 at 01:48 PM EST. Page 3 of 3. 16 Comments.
POWER9 Blackbird
POWER9 Blackbird
POWER9 Blackbird

In terms of the real-world impact from this more frequent L1 data cache flushing on POWER9, database servers like MariaDB (MySQL) and PostgreSQL did record consistent minor performance impacts of this mitigation. At least not as bad as the early pre-hardware-mitigation Intel performance hits from their early issues.

POWER9 Blackbird
POWER9 Blackbird
POWER9 Blackbird
POWER9 Blackbird
POWER9 Blackbird

Database workloads seem to be the main area we have benchmarked so far where there is a small but consistent slide in performance from running a mitigated kernel. But overall not too bad and can fortunately be easily disabled via the new kernel options if so desired. Over the Thanksgiving days I'll be running additional benchmarks of the more time consuming test cases on Blackbird and the Talos II to see if there are any other surprises that remain for the performance but at least to date I have not overall found anything too dramatic.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.