This paper summarizes real-world impact measurements of the Spectre and Meltdown patches, based on benchmarks run at a Spirent customer site on real-world servers and real-world workloads. Empirical data on the impact of the patches is presented – eliminating guesswork.

Armed with this information, organizations can assess their own plans for patching against Spectre and Meltdown, while being prepared with mitigating the significant performance impact through additional hardware deployments, workload shifts, or other methods.