Spectre & Meltdown patches which were introduced over the processor bug that most major cloud services and other providers have issued patches for already are slowing down servers. How much are these patches slowing down servers? Well, it depends on the processor you have and what it is running. Some are saying as much as a 30 percent drop.
But Google says you generally do not have to worry about it, at least with search rankings. Google has said time and time again that only really really slow pages will suffer in Google, not the just average slow pages. So with these patches, even a 30% hike in the CPU spikes should not significantly impact most web servers from serving your pages fast enough to rank fine in Google.
John Mueller from Google said on Twitter , "we currently differentiate between those that are really, really slow, and the rest - I doubt this would push any site over. That said, users really don't care why a site is slow."
We currently differentiate between those that are really, really slow, and the rest - I doubt this would push any site over. That said, users really don't care why a site is slow.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) January 15, 2018
So don't worry about this patch and how it might impact your Google search rankings.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
