It is not the overhead of the TLS bit but the chain of trust. Putting a caching proxy in the middle of the system is breaking that trust chain. You can do pro

It is not the overhead of the TLS bit but the chain of trust. Putting a caching proxy in the middle of the system is breaking that trust chain. You can do proxy with TLS but it is tricky to do to maintain that chain of trust. A proxy would be a classic way to mitigate (not eliminate) that sort of issue. Either on the serving side or client side. Basically lower the data being returned but not the calls from the clients themselves (this is a DDoS issue). TLS just makes it harder to do proxy.