SSL Performance hit?

[Greg Treichel]

HI,
I'm running IIS4 and NT4 SP4. I'm interested in running one of my web
sites requiring SSL. Has anyone done any performance testing to see what
sort of a performance hit it is? I know that all of the documentation says
"significant", but how much is significant?

20% slower?, etc..... I know it is a general question and all environments
are different with what they are running, but there must be some stats.

TIA......Greg

[Mike]

I'm getting ready to use 128k SSL for an employee self-service application - I'm worried as well.

I guess there are just too many factors involved to give a straight percentage for processor utilization, so what can you do ? a. Run MS-Chap to authenticate and force everyone to use IE v2 or greater or b. allow basic authentication and run the risk of getting compromised.

Personally, I've never run SSL on an NT machine, but when in the past when I've used it on a couple of SUN Ultra 2s, it made them extremely slow. These were Extranet customer sites and people often complained, telling us to get a faster machine.

SUN Ultra 2s are good machines.

Two rules of thumb when using SSL are:

-Only place pages in the SSL enabled directory that contain or receive sensitive information.
-Limit the use of high-bandwidth items like graphics and multi-media on these pages.

Mike

On 1/18/99 1:13:02 PM, Greg Treichel wrote:
> HI,
I'm running IIS4 and NT4 SP4. I'm interested in running
> one of my web
sites requiring SSL. Has anyone done any performance
> testing to see what
sort of a performance hit it is? I know that all of
> the documentation says
"significant", but how much is
> significant?

20% slower?, etc..... I know it is a general question and
> all environments
are different with what they are running, but there must
> be some stats.

TIA......Greg