The effects of Meltdown on PHP-performance under IIS in Hyper-V environments : A quantitative study inspecting Meltdown-patch effects on PHP under IIS

Meltdown and Spectre are two vulnerabilities discovered in 2017. These vulnerabilities allow unauthorized users to extract confidential information from systems. Security patches have been developed to resolve these vulnerabilities, but with a potental performance loss. This report investigates how PHP is affected by Microsofts web server IIS, with the security patch developed by Microsoft to protect systems against Meltdown and Spectre applied. In a practical laboratory experiment, the JMeter tool has been used to create a simulated load on the web server system, where PHPts CPU usage is monitored and noted for further analysis. The result shows that there has been a 13.74% performance loss with Microsofts security patch applied. This opens up for discussion about what Microsofts security patch actually does in a system, and if there is a suffciently large degradation to consider a transition to another solution