Re: SSL is slow

[Chris R. <chr...@me...>]

Lars Skj=E6rlund <la...@sp...> wrote:
> Hi Gary,
>=20
>>> Is there any way to speedup this initial login?
>>=20
>> Encryption is a CPU intensive process. Check your CPU
>> utilization to see if your server processor is a=20
>> bottleneck. If so, an obvious solution would be to=20
>> upgrade the processor. On another platform, a hardware=20
>> crypto board may be a solution but I'm not sure if one=20
>> is available for Novell.
>=20
> Don't think so. However, utilization isn't the problem: LDAP is _very_

I agree with Lars, since each end is using symmetric encryption to encrypt
the traffic, and since symmetric algorithms are supposed to be extremely
fast and use little CPU.

I looked at a crypto accelerator card recently (Rainbow, or whatever
they're called now :-) and it mostly just speeds up the SSL handshake which
uses RSA. It certainly makes HTTPS *very* quick, but of course it costs
quite a lot of money too.

Cheers,

Chris