Benchmarking Clear Linux With KPTI + Retpoline Support
Like with our benchmarks on other distributions, Redis performance is notably affected by the KPTI and Retpoline support.
The Apache web server performance is also affected.
Those are the results as they stand right now for Intel's Clear Linux distribution when going from no Meltdown/Spectre protection to having the latest Kernel Page Table Isolation and Retpoline support. The impact is roughly in line with what we've been seeing on other Linux distributions where I/O and other high kernel interactivity workloads do see a performance impact, but at least not generally around the 30% figure that some had hyped up these CPU vulnerabilities to having. As these kernel patches continue to mature and see more optimization work on performance, we'll certainly have continued benchmarks on Phoronix.
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