Spectre and meltdown CPU security holes performance impact

What are Spectre and Meltdown?

Have you noticed your servers or desktops are running slower than usual? Spectre and Meltdown can affect most devices we use daily. Cloud servers, desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. For more details go to: https://meltdownattack.com/

How does this affect performance?

We finally have some answers to how this is going to affect us. After Pantheon patched their servers they released an article showing the 10-30% negative performance impact that servers are going to have. For the whole article visit: https://status.pantheon.io/incidents/x9dmhz368xfz

I can say that I personally have noticed my laptop’s CPU is running at much higher percentages than before the update for similar tasks.
Security patches are still being released for many operating systems, but traditional desktop OSs appear to have been covered now. If you haven’t already, make sure your OS is up to date. Don’t forget to update the OS on your phone.

Next Steps?

So what can we do in the Drupal world? First, you should follow up with your hosting provider and verify they have patched your servers. Then you need to find ways to counteract the performance loss. If you are interested in performance recommendations, Four Kitchens offers both frontend and backend performance audits.

As a quick win, if you haven’t already, upgrade to PHP7 which should give you a performance boost around 30-50% on PHP processes. Now that you are more informed about what Spectre and Meltdown are, help with the performance effort by volunteering or sponsoring a developer on January 27, 2018 and January 28, 2018 for the Drupal Global Sprint Weekend 2018, specifically on performance related issues: https://groups.drupal.org/node/517797