Meltdown and Spectre – Performance Impact

InterSystems has performed various system and application benchmarks to determine the potential performance impact after the corrections for Meltdown have been applied.

Overall our tests have shown at worst a performance degradation of less than 2% and in some cases slightly better performance, but within the margin of error of testing. All tests confirm that the specific performance impact to a deployed application is directly related to how this application is using system resources. Specifically, this means that in certain cases (e.g. a query)  a larger performance impact is possible.

While InterSystems has no evidence of significant performance degradations for customer applications, we strongly recommend that customers perform their own performance evaluation.

InterSystems continues to work with our OS, hypervisor, and processor partners on performance testing and further upgrades will be provided if/when necessary.

[InterSystems tested on RHEL 7.4 and Windows Server 2016 with Haswell, Broadwell and Skylake; using 64-bit, on both bare metal and virtual servers with VMware vSphere 6.5 (latest updates)]