Performance after Meltdown and Spectre Security Patches?

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joesc

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Performance after Meltdown and Spectre Security Patches?

#1

Post by joesc » Wed Jan 10, 2018 1:14 am

After reading the news from Microsoft that their Meltdown and Spectre security patches will cause significant and noticeable performance hits on Windows 7 & 8 machines, especially on CPU's older than 2 years old, I'm wondering if anyone has seen this on their WMC setup?

Alan G

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#2

Post by Alan G » Wed Jan 10, 2018 1:27 pm

For routine computer tasks the patches will have no effect at all. The issue will be with large storage arrays used for cloud storage/computing.

joesc

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#3

Post by joesc » Thu Jan 11, 2018 1:02 am

Alan G wrote:For routine computer tasks the patches will have no effect at all. The issue will be with large storage arrays used for cloud storage/computing.
That's not true for Windows 7 PC. Hence the reason I posted here. Per Terry Myerson at Microsoft:
"With Windows 8 and Windows 7 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), we expect most users to notice a decrease in system performance."
&
"Older versions of Windows have a larger performance impact because Windows 7 and Windows 8 have more user-kernel transitions because of legacy design decisions, such as all font rendering taking place in the kernel."
source: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/micros ... s-systems/

So I'm asking if anyone with WMC running on Win 7 has seen any performance impacts with these patches.

glugglug

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#4

Post by glugglug » Thu Jan 11, 2018 3:17 am

The bad news is that looking in Perfmon, almost all CPU usage of wmpnetwk.exe, which handles media libraries and I think streams to extenders, is kernel time.
The good news is that if you are watching recorded TV, not transcoding .MKVs or other files streamed, the total CPU usage of media center is too low for this to matter on a system less than ~12 years old. I suspect the transcoding would also not have enough user/kernel transitions to matter, but haven't tested this.

The only way I could see it maybe being an issue for WMC is maybe if you have a really old machine configured to use legacy IDE instead of AHCI or something like that.

joesc

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#5

Post by joesc » Thu Jan 11, 2018 3:53 am

Thanks for reminding me to use Perfmon. It looks like ehrecvr.exe (Windows Media Receiver Service) it taking up 5% of CPU on my system with nothing going on. No recordings or streaming. I'll have to check all that when recordings and streaming are happening and including the Ceton serices and comskip. Then I guess add 30% to that to see what effect the patches would have just to be conservative. I've got an older i5. I'll report back what I see before installing the patch later.

Mike88

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#6

Post by Mike88 » Thu Jan 11, 2018 4:34 am

joesc wrote:After reading the news from Microsoft that their Meltdown and Spectre security patches will cause significant and noticeable performance hits on Windows 7 & 8 machines, especially on CPU's older than 2 years old, I'm wondering if anyone has seen this on their WMC setup?
I see you have been in this other thread where I may be having a problem.
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11457

I'll see what shows up later tonight regarding my recordings.

joesc

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#7

Post by joesc » Fri Jan 12, 2018 6:17 am

Well, even with a couple of simultaneous recordings the total WMC usage never went over 15%. So even a 30% hit shouldn't be too bad. I've decided to move my comskip processing till after 1am when I'm most likely not going to be using the computer. If I don't read of any other issues with the patch, I'll try it this weekend and report back.

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