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Meltdown Performance Effects On Cassandra

The folks at Instaclustr have done some analysis on how Meltdown has affected Cassandra performance on AWS:

In our Security Advisory published 8 January, we advised of up to 20% increase in CPU utilization and small increase in latency across managed clusters in AWS and GCP following the rollout of the patches to the cloud provider hypervisors. We have since observed a reversal of this impact in the weeks following the initial announcements. That is, these effects disappeared when further AWS and GCP patches were rolled out by the cloud providers.

We assessed the risk of the vulnerabilities to our environment as Low. Our clusters run as single tenant and customer access is limited to the application layer.  If a user were able to exploit either of the vulnerabilities they could only gain access to their own information.

In short, they saw a change early on, but subsequent patching has removed that performance degradation.  Read the whole thing for more details.