A Look At The MDS Cost On Xeon, EPYC & Xeon Total Impact Of Affected CPU Vulnerabilities

Memcached is one of the real-world workloads impacted by the MDS mitigations, in addition to PostgreSQL and others.

Overall, when taking the geometric mean across dozens of Linux benchmarks carried out on the Xeon Gold 6138 dual-socket server, the newly-added MDS mitigations to the Linux kernel took a 5% performance hit. With the desktop systems tested with its similar but different set of benchmarks was a 8~10% hit in affected workloads, but not entirely the same tests due to e.g. not running web browser benchmarks on the server. For the same set of tests as seen on the Xeon Gold server, the Xeon E3-1275 v6 server did see a 10% hit with the MDS mitigations.