Performance evaluation of HTTPS library

[Stefan Behnel]

Ashish Vyas, 12.10.2010 14:40:
> When I send request using HTTP, I am able to reach 1 transaction (request sent,
> response rcvd and validated.) per second from 20 parallel connections easily.
> Average response time shown is about 0.15 seconds.
> However, when I send request using HTTPS, I am seeing that the response time
> shown by tool goes to 1.1 seconds for same 20 parallel connection each trying 1
> transaction per second.

You shouldn't overestimate the performance requirements for SSL/TLS support 
inside of the server application itself, simply because it's not used that 
much in real world deployments.

It's actually very common to use a proxy to handle HTTPS traffic, and to 
forward the requests as plain HTTP to the "real" server. Separating the two 
gives you more freedom in your deployment (e.g. you can deploy the HTTPS 
proxy locally or on an entirely different machine at a suitable place in 
the network architecture), and makes your server generally more scalable. 
You can additionally use the HTTPS proxy machine to distribute the normal 
HTTP load over multiple server instances. There's even dedicated networking 
hardware for SSL/TLS proxying if you need it.

Stefan