Evaluating Mitigations For Meltdown and Spectre : Benchmarking performance of mitigations against database management systems with OLTP workload

Sammanfattning: With Spectre and Meltdown out in the public, a rushed effort was made to patch these vulnerabilities by operating system vendors. However, with the mitigations against said vulnerabilities there will be some form of performance impact. This study aims to find out how much of an impact the software mitigations against Spectre and Meltdown have on database management systems during an online transaction processing workload. An experiment was carried out to evaluate two popular open-source database management systems and see how they were affected before and after the software mitigations against Spectre and Meltdown was applied. The study found that there is an average of 4-5% impact on the performance when the software mitigations is applied. The study also compared the two database management systems with each other and found that PostgreSQL can have a reduced performance of about 27% when both a hypervisor and the operating system is patched against Spectre and Meltdown.