It doesn't hurt to get a performance boost from your processor's crypto instructions, assuming you optimized your cipher lists to prefer crypto with a modern hw

It doesn't hurt to get a performance boost from your processor's crypto instructions, assuming you optimized your cipher lists to prefer crypto with a modern hw implementation (AES128-NI is 179% faster than RC4). But is this traffic ongoing connections, new connections, a mix? They have different penalties, and result in different numbers: 90Gbps of ongoing connections might be, like, 100,000hps, but 90Gbps of new connections during primetime might only net you 50,000hps. And are you using Google's UDP TLS stuff? Google also hacked on the kernel a lot to improve their performance, I don't know if any of that's upstream currently though. Maybe Cloudflare can answer you, as they seem to support the most HTTPS wizardry of the big CDNs.