3 ms·
If you just put a static "Hello World" webpage on a server and try to benchmark it with something generic like `ab`, yes, HTTPS appears to be several times slow
by kijin 12y ago
If you just put a static "Hello World" webpage on a server and try to benchmark it with something generic like `ab`, yes, HTTPS appears to be several times slower than HTTP.
If you put a real web application on that server, enable all the bells and whistles (keep-alive, session cache, OCSP stapling, SPDY, etc), and configure your benchmark tool to make use of those features, the performance penalty of HTTPS becomes less than 5%.
And that was a couple of years ago on a relatively low-end VPS. Nowadays, the difference is probably even smaller.
- avian 12y ago> If you just put a static "Hello World" webpage on a server and try to benchmark it with something generic like `ab`, yes, HTTPS appears to be several times slower than HTTP. Can you suggest a benchmark tool that can be used to give a more realistic figure than `ab`? I know jmeter can do session caching, but I find its interface baffling and I can't find a pre-made configuration. I recently compared performance of my home ARM server when serving my blog through HTTP and HTTPS: https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2014/11/cubietruck_ssl_performance/ https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2014/11/cubietru...
- kijin 12y agoSorry, it's been a while since I've looked at HTTP/S benchmarking tools, so I can't say which one has the latest & greatest features. By the way, did you use `ab` with the `-k` option when you ran those benchmarks? Testing HTTPS without keep-alive is utterly meaningless, since every browser aggressively reuses HTTPS connections nowadays.