Introduction
There is a lot of coverage in the general and technical news with respect to security vulnerabilities in various microprocessors from various manufacturers but primarily Intel. Some links are:
The last of these gives an analysis of where the Chip and Operating system suppliers are with patching and does not just rely on their press releases and in this author's opinion is a good point of reference.
Effect on B2B Services
Virtually all of B2B's services operate on Intel based hardware. We will be applying patches as they become available. Until those patches can be applied we do not know what the exact effect on our systems performances will be but we are working on the following assumptions.
- Generally our servers are running well below 50% CPU utilisation, even at peak times, so the estimated worst case 30% performance hit should not bring things to a complete halt. However if a process is taking longer to compute it will take longer to display.
- We expect data intensive tasks such as reports to suffer slower completion times
- Users with large and complex order histories may find there are delays in displaying their list of available catalogues.
B2B's Response
Until we have applied the various patches we are unable to detail our exact response. We are already well in to the process of preparing our systems to be fully "cloud compatible" and we foresee moving workloads to the cloud as the route we would use to move to higher power processing units should it be necessary. Unfortunately we will not be the only company thinking the same and it is possible that even the big cloud suppliers will have difficulty coping with the high demand for their services.
All we can promise is that we will do all we reasonably can to mitigate the effects of these challenges.
We will update this section of our support site as things progress.
Update
All B2B systems have now received the operating system and other patches supplied by the appropriate manufacturers to mitigate the Meltdown and Spectre security concerns. We are monitoring system performance but it will be a day or two before we will be able to draw any conclusions on potential performance impacts. If you experience any slow down or similar challenges with one of our sites please raise a support ticket with full details so that we can investigate sooner rather than later.
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