The CPU utilization of Epic's game server which introduced the CPU vulnerability meltdown countermeasure patch exploded

Vulnerability inherent in the CPU The measures of "Meltdown" and "Specter" are said to be possible to decrease the machine performance by applying the software update. Although systems with little influence are reported, reports have also been reported that the CPU usage rate of distribution servers for online games will increase significantly.

Epic Services & Stability Update
https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/forums/news/announcements/132642-epic-services-stability-update

Epic Games's popular game "Fortnite Battle Royale"There was an explanation from the management side on the official forum about the situation where the condition that login can not be done is occurring.

The cause of the instability of the system is that it is in response to the vulnerability "meltdown" inherent in the Intel CPU which has become a big turbulence since the beginning of 2018. Epic Games's all backend services are dependent on the cloud, and it seems that the impact of users' gaming is affected by this influence in the middle of updating work applying the meltdown countermeasure patch.

When Epic Games applied a meltdown countermeasure patch to one of the servers used for Fortnite Battle Royale's backend service, the graph shows the CPU usage rate rose sharply as follows . Although the anticipation that the performance deterioration of the server was about 5% to 30% by the meltdown countermeasure software update was expected, it was expected that it depends on the use situation such as workload from Intel, in the case of Fortnite Battle Royale server, performance The effect on CPU usage is significant, and it can be confirmed that the CPU usage rate is about doubled.


According to Epic Games, we are planning to update the cloud services we are using to serve the service sequentially, and that there is a possibility that unexpected problems may occur in the second week of January 2018. We are stating that we are cooperating with cloud service providers to prevent problems and respond promptly to problems.