“Recent tests conducted by researcher Networkshop Inc. indicate
that powerful Web servers capable of handling hundreds of
transactions per second may be brought to a near standstill by
heavy SSL traffic.”
“The growing problem of SSL performance has driven vendors to
develop devices that can help share the Web server’s processing
load. IPivot Inc. next month will ship two new processors that can
offload authentication and encryption on e-commerce sites.”
“According to Networkshop, even the most powerful,
general-purpose Web server hardware can be dragged down by large
volumes of SSL traffic. In its most recent tests, the research
company found that a typical Pentium server configuration running
Linux and Apache, which at full capacity can handle about 322
connections per second of standard HTTP traffic, fell to about 24
connections per second when handling a full load of SSL
traffic.
“A similar test conducted on a Sun 450 server running Solaris
and Apache experienced even more trouble. The server handled about
500 connections per second of HTTP traffic at full capacity, but
only about 3 connections per second when the traffic was secured
via SSL.”