Looking At The Linux Performance Two Years After Spectre / Meltdown Mitigations

Next we move onto a look at the Intel Xeon performance impact from the current default mitigations on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS in various server workloads.

The Sockperf benchmarks that stress the kernel's socket performance show the clear performance overhead pre-Cascadelake.

Similarly, Microsoft's Ethr network benchmark shows the significant hits on Skylake and Kabylake from the default mitigations while the Xeon Platinum 8280 saw just a small change in performance.

As shown with the desktop tests, the Java performance difference can be measurable from these software mitigations.