[kwlug-disc] Meltdown and computer sales

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

Just a followup on Meltdown and kernel patches for it.

I have an HP Core i5 laptop with a broken screen hinge that sits in
the basement powered off most of the time. Every month or so, I will
walk to it with the USB disk that the PVR records on it stuff off the
ATSC antenna. The files are huge and I wrote a transcoder to reduce
the size by about 1/10th with no noticeable degradation in video
quality (I posted the libav command to do so in another thread).

Anyways, this is about the heaviest CPU load that I ever do.

The scripts that do the transcoding output some statistics (number of
MBs processed, and time elapsed).

So I compared 7 or samples from before the Meltdown patches, and 1
sample after, and the good news is that the after-patch performance
falls within the range of previous runs.

But this is just video transcoding, not any other type of workload
(e.g. I/O intensive, database, locking of kernel structures, and the
like).

Just wanted to share this anecdote.

Still did not update any of my desktops or (dedicated) servers.

Anyone else found performance to be worse (or same or better) in real
life examples?