I didn't see any claim that https is faster. If you benchmark https on a path where encryption is the only significant work being done, and on hardware that doe

I didn't see any claim that https is faster. If you benchmark https on a path where encryption is the only significant work being done, and on hardware that does not have encryption acceleration, then it will appear to be a lot slower. However, in real world applications the https encryption is usually accelerated by a dedicated processor feature, and the other work being done for a request is going to make the encryption time irrelevant. If you are serving static files over http, on a machine with an old cpu, with enough volume to saturate your cpu on http, then https will slow it down significantly. But typically, any server doing that will have 100x more capacity than it needs anyway.