As promised in my initial blog post on this matter, Apache Ignite community applied security patches against the notorious Meltdown Spectre vulnerabilities and completed performance testing of general operations and workloads that are typical for Ignite deployments.

The security patches were applied only for CVE-2017-5754 (Meltdown) and CVE-2017-5753 (Spectre Variant 1) vulnerabilities. The patches for CVE-2017-5715 (Spectre Variant 2) for the hardware the community used for testing are not stable yet an can cause system reboot issues or another unpredictable behavior.

The applied patches have shown that the performance implications are negligible - the performance drop is just in the 0 - 7% range as the figure shows:

Spectre_and_Meltdown_Benchmarks

Thus, Apache Ignite community highly recommends its customers and partners to consider security patches for CVE-2017-5754 (Meltdown) and CVE-2017-5753 (Spectre Variant 1) in their deployment environments and contact us on the user list if you run into a larger performance drop in your use case.

At the same time, we're keeping an eye on Intel announcements and will validate the performance implications of Spectre Variant 2 once a solution is released by the hardware vendor.

Just for your reference, the benchmarks were executed in the following environment and configuration.

Benchmarking Environment

Cluster Configuration:

4 servers and 8 client nodes
Apache Ignite version: 2.4.0

Hardware:

Huawei RH2288 V3, CPU - 2x Xeon E5-2609 v4, 1.7GHz, RAM - 96Gb, SSD - 3x800Gb RAID0 2.4Tb, Network - 10Gb/s
DEll R610, CPU - 2x Xeon X5570, RAM - 96Gb, SSD - 512Gb, HDD - 2048GB, Network - 10Gb/s

Operating System:

OS CentOS Linux release 7.4.1708 (Core)
Kernel - Linux 3.10.0-693.11.6.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Thu Jan 4 01:06:37 UTC 2018 x86_64