[Twisted-web] HTTPS server performance

[L. Daniel Burr]

Hi Mircea,

On Thu, 25 May 2006 00:20:30 -0500, Mircea Amarascu  
<mircea.amarascu at gmail.com> wrote:

> I need a basic HTTPS server, without any web applications support,
> so I've decided to use the listenTCP and listenSSL methods, together
> with a twisted.web.http.HTTPFactory, a twisted.web.http.HTTPChannel  
> protocol
> and a twisted.web.http.Request handler.

[description of configuration]

> I'm testing this configuration with ApacheBench (ab), and I get some 800
> requests/sec for HTTP, and only about 30 requests/sec for HTTPS. I now  
> that
> the ratio for HTTPS is about 60% of HTTP, so I was wondering if I'm
> doing something wrong, or what is causing this problem.

SSL encryption/decryption is a fairly expensive operation; the server is  
doing a lot more work in this case.  The numbers you are seeing aren't  
unreasonable, when you take the CPU-intensive nature of SSL into account.

Hope this helps,

L. Daniel Burr