On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Niels Bakker <niels=nanog@bakker.net> wrote:
* mikal@stillhq.com (Michael Still) [Fri 01 Nov 2013, 05:27 CET]:
Its about the CPU cost of the crypto. I was once told the number of CPUs
required to do SSL on web search (which I have now forgotten) and it was a bigger number than you'd expect -- certainly hundreds.
"On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that."
That was *front end* SSL/TLS - not internal / back end SSL/TLS. One could assert that the per-activity SSL/TLS overhead might be the same for internal services accessed to answer a front-end request, but that's not necessarily true. The code/request ratios and external/internal SSL/TLS startup costs are going to vary wildly from service to service. -- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com