Windows Server Performance Impact of Meltdown and Spectre Patches

Windows Server Performance Impact of Meltdown and Spectre Patches

test performance impact of Meltdown and Spectre patches in OS Guest Windows Server 2016 on DELL FX2s and FC430 blade server. For all test i used CPU-Z and Crystal Disk Mark, always with same settings.

Configuration for Meltdown and Spectre tests

 ESXi node

• DELL EMC FX2 with PowerEdge FC430 blade
• DellEMC-ESXi-6.5U1-5969303-A00 (Dell) on beginning test
• 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2640 v3 @ 2.60GHz
• 32 GB RAM
• INFOTREND Storage – 8 x 1 TB 7.2k HDD RAID0, direct connect via SFP 10 GbE
• BIOS 2.3.5
• Only 1 VM running for testing purposes

Virtual machine

• Windows Server 2016 – 1607 (OS Build 14393.447) on beginning test
• 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM
• 40 GB hard drive for OS
• Using LSI Logic SAS controller
• Network adapter (VMXNET3)
• VM version 13

Test before appyling the Microsoft guest update

System info after clean install WS 2016

No updates have been installed on first test

The Results:

The results before applying guest os patch KB4057142

Test AFTER appyling the Microsoft guest update KB4057142

Guest OS with latest updates.

Latest KB4057142

OS Build 14393.2035

The Results:

The difference:

The conclusion:

The conclusion: The updates, which fixes Meltdown and Spectre vulnerability doesn´t have significant impact on performance on Windows Server 2016 Guest OS

Coming soon:

Meltdown and Spectre performance impact of BIOS and VMware ESXi update 🙂