SPECTRE PERFORMANCE 7118 PATCH

Generally, one would test for a “best case” test of the speed aspect of your applications performance.Ī simplified view of this is “how fast can the app do X task?” Performance within a Citrix XenApp farm can be described in two ways. This is simply a snapshot of a single point in time to show the metrics of these systems. Applications are published from Citrix XenApp 6.5. The operating system of all the VM’s is Windows Server 2008 R2.

SPECTRE PERFORMANCE 7118 PATCH

The one big notable change is one host of each pair has the Spectre and Meltdown patch applied to the ESXi hypervisor. Each pair of hosts have identical processors. I was able to setup 4 of these pairs of hosts. My setup consists of two ESXi (version 6.0) hosts with identical VM’s on each, hosting identical applications. I wanted to test ON/OFF workloads of the mitigation impacts. Older OS’s suffer more due to the design (at the time) that involved running more code in kernel mode (fonts was signalled out as an example of one of these design decision) than newer OS’s.Īs with most things on my blog I am particularly interested in the impact against Citrix/Remote Desktop Services type of workloads. Even worse, older operating systems would not support CPU features (PCID) that could reduce the performance impact. Microsoft made comments that server OS’s could be hit particularly hard. Initial benchmarks made mention that storage was hit particularly hard. Spectre (variant 2), of the two, threatened to degrade performance fairly drastically. However, around March/April 2018, the release of the Spectre patch was finalized and the microcode released. Spectre (variant 2) mitigation had a problematic release, causing numerous issues for whomever installed the fix, that it had to be recalled and the release delayed weeks. Patches for both were released extremely quickly for Microsoft OS’s but because of a variety of issues with Spectre, only Meltdown was truly available to be mitigated. Meltdown and Spectre (variant 2) are two vulnerabilities that came out at the same time, however they are vastly different.

Spectre performance 7118