Amazon EC2 Cloud Compute Performance: December vs. February

For those wondering how Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) performance is now after being mitigated for the recent Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities, here are benchmarks of five Linux distributions comparing the performance to last December prior to the Linux kernel mitigations coming about to now.

Back in mid-December I carried out a six-way Amazon EC2 cloud comparison following the recent of Amazon Linux 2. Having those results and the reproducibility and automation of the Phoronix Test Suite, I re-ran those tests on the five Linux distributions for seeing how the performance of these Linux platforms have evolved since December.

The same m4.4xlarge instance type was used for all of the benchmarking from the Ohio US East 2 data-center. The m4.4xlarge instance type has 16 vCPUs yielding a rated 53.5 Elastic Compute Units (ECU) and 64GB of system memory. All of the m4.4xlarge instances were backed by Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 Broadwell processors.

The Linux distributions tested then and now were Amazon Linux 2, Clear Linux, RHEL Server 7, SUSE Linux Enterprise 3 12 SP3, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Prior to running the benchmarks, all available system updates were applied. All of the benchmarks were done in an automated and reproducible manner using the Phoronix Test Suite.