You don't really need NIC TLS unless your bitrate is rather high and you're serving data that is stored on disk / in disk cache rather than data that was just g

You don't really need NIC TLS unless your bitrate is rather high and you're serving data that is stored on disk / in disk cache rather than data that was just generated on the CPU. Bulk ciphering is pretty inexpensive since Intel Haswell (2014) where there was a big improvement in AES-NI, but the load and store around ciphering static content that could otherwise avoid a trip through the CPU can be a significant bottleneck at 100gbps+. I'm sure there are measurable gains from TLS offload in other situations, but it's only critical for static content at high bit rates.