![]() ![]() "Despite the performance impact, AWS was protecting its customers. "We’re still investigating the longer term impact on our system," Branch's Chan says. In fact, AWS pushed out yet another refinement on Friday to improve performance right as this story went live. Even after all of its struggles and the money it had to spend to handle the problem, Branch says it sympathizes with AWS, and everyone working to deploy the patches. ![]() "We sell performance, so if it was going to slow us down that would have a very big impact on our business."Īnd though installing the Meltdown and Spectre patches has been an enormous effort and caused real grief, many in the industry remain upbeat about the challenge. "You’re suddenly in an emergency situation where there’s kind of a fog of war," Cumming says. ![]() "The mystery reboots from just a few weeks earlier suddenly made sense."įor its part, Cloudflare, which claims to manage almost 10 percent of internet requests worldwide, says that in the end it managed the performance issues with the Meltdown and Spectre patches by putting extensive resources into testing the fixes before pushing them out. "At some point someone floated the hypothesis that it was an underlying performance issue due to the Spectre and Meltdown patches being applied by AWS," Chan says. The team kept Branch's services operational by reworking some of their architecture, and purchasing more server capacity from AWS to stabilize the workloads. We were seemingly chasing a non-existent bug in our system." "We spent a few days eliminating possibilities one after another, but were unable to find a root cause. "We had six engineers crammed in a small war room all staring at charts, deploy logs, revision histories, and latency graphs looking for the cause," Chan says. But the server slowdowns a few weeks later presented a more pressing concern. An unexpected round of AWS server reboots in December had already struck Ian Chan, Branch's director of engineering, as odd. Think the drive needs a firmware update but its going in a USB enclosure FWIW.In the early days of 2018, the engineering team at the mobile services company Branch noticed slowdowns and errors with its Amazon Web Services cloud servers. Be interesting what the score would be after disabling the security patches. Of course I ran it on a live system so its not a 100% representative benchmark of the drive but still looks bad. I ran an HDTune Benchmark as well this morning, caching enabled in the driver, and got subpar scores: In any case I just ordered a Western Digital Blue 3D Sata 6G M.2 drive to replace it yesterday so it should be interesting if things improve. However after google searching this morning I discovered that the Samsung PM851 drive that is in there is affected by a slowdown issue much like the one affecting the 840 EVO line as both are TLC. I ran the InSpectre Utility and it stated that I am completely patched and protected with minimal system performance affect as supposedly my processor is modern enough not to be affected. I have found that using edge and doing light mixed work at 50 brightness im getting around 7 hours or so of work. You can then at least decide if the patch warrants the speed hit. I got the 17 16GB IPS version of the 14 as I wanted the 12-hour battery life people were quoting in reviews. It will tell you whether you are currently patched against the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, but more importantly, it may give you the option to disable the Meltdown patch. Anything older than that can’t be patched at all, and anything newer (beginning with Haswell) has the CPU feature set which allows the fast fix.ĭownload the utility InSpectre. Since the needed feature for a fast fix is not in the CPU, an inefficient fix (cache flushing) has to be implemented. The slow down is caused by the fix for Meltdown on Westmere, Sandy Bridge, and Ivy Bridge Intel CPUs. ![]()
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