Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Impact on Web Server Performance

Abstract

There are always tradeoffs between security and performance, and security protocols are no exception. This report specifically focuses on one of the most common security protocols, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and its effect on the web server performance. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is the most popular protocol used in the Internet for facilitating secure communications through authentication, encryption, and decryption. Although the use of SSL provides adequate security, it might lead to performance degradations compared to non-secure protocols. In this paper, we analyze the performance and impact of SSL on the web server in terms of the percentage of total processing time, memory available (in bytes), network interface bytes total per second and average disk queue length. The experimental study is based on Intel Pentium IV Windows 2003 operating systems. The major conclusions of this paper are first, SSL increases the percentage of total processing time, second, it decreases the memory available bytes, and third, it has not impacted the network interface bytes total per second as well as physical disk average disk queue length. SSL has more significant impact on the percentage of total processing time than the impact on the memory available bytes. Index Terms-Average disk queue length, bytes total/sec, memory available bytes, SSL, server performance, total processor time, web server, workloads.