AWS CPUs See 25% Performance Hit After Meltdown Patch

It’s a meltdown alright! While conflicting reports have surfaced regarding the performance impact of the newly discovered CPU bugs on the cloud world, more information continues to make its way up.

This latest chronicle by software vendor SolarWinds shows some distressing numbers.

Basically, the patch that AWS deployed on its cloud infrastructure to fix the Meltdown vulnerability has resulted in processors being made to work 25% harder. In other words, cloud operations are now either slow, or expensive, as a result of this patch.

SolarWinds is an infrastructure management software supplier, and runs its software on the Amazon Web Services platform.

Needless to say, the company and its customers were affected last week by the patches that Amazon rushed out in order to mitigate against the Meltdown vulnerability. This is, of course, one of two hardware flaws affecting most modern processors that were revealed at the start of the year.

The other being Spectre.

SolarWinds claimed that its services had been impacted by the patch, but performance has been improved as AWS has thrown resources at the problem recently.

Nevertheless, it saw sudden shifts in CPU performance demanding more processor resources to do the same work. In some cases, they had noticed CPU jumps of roughly 25%. And not only that, they also suffered from partial downtime due to the efforts AWS made to fix Meltdown on its cloud.

The company has provided a more detailed breakdown of the numbers at the link above.

But it’s clear that the cloud world has suffered the most as a result of these hardware vulnerabilities, where performance is directly tied to the price the users have to pay.

It’s going to be a while before the effects subside.