We can use HTTPS, but it is usually slower and less reliable. If you are uploading a 10 MB attachment to gmail using HTTPS, you should expect it to timeout and

We can use HTTPS, but it is usually slower and less reliable. If you are uploading a 10 MB attachment to gmail using HTTPS, you should expect it to timeout and fail 4 or 5 times before you either succeed or give up. With HTTP there is usually no problem. When I was downloading some large files from S3, I noticed that the transfer speed was 10-15 kB/s. I changed the URL to use HTTP and immediately got a 4x speedup (almost the nominal speed my ISP offers). Sometimes HTTPS is almost as good as HTTP. Usually it is 3-5x slower. Near special occasions (election days, etc) it is so slow you would get a timeout error 9 times out of 10.