How much overhead does SSL impose?

Question

I know there's no single hard-and-fast answer, but is there a generic order-of-magnitude estimate approximation for the encryption overhead of SSL versus unencrypted socket communication? I'm talking only about the comm processing and wire time, not counting application-level processing.

Update

There is a question about HTTPS versus HTTP, but I'm interested in looking lower in the stack.

(I replaced the phrase "order of magnitude" to avoid confusion; I was using it as informal jargon rather than in the formal CompSci sense. Of course if I had meant it formally, as a true geek I would have been thinking binary rather than decimal! ;-)

Update

Per request in comment, assume we're talking about good-sized messages (range of 1k-10k) over persistent connections. So connection set-up and packet overhead are not significant issues.

Answer 1

Order of magnitude: zero.

In other words, you won't see your throughput cut in half, or anything like it, when you add TLS. Answers to the "duplicate" question focus heavily on application performance, and how that compares to SSL overhead. This question specifically excludes application processing, and seeks to compare non-SSL to SSL only. While it makes sense to take a global view of performance when optimizing, that is not what this question is asking.

The main overhead of SSL is the handshake. That's where the expensive asymmetric cryptography happens. After negotiation, relatively efficient symmetric ciphers are used. That's why it can be very helpful to enable SSL sessions for your HTTPS service, where many connections are made. For a long-lived connection, this "end-effect" isn't as significant, and sessions aren't as useful.

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Here's an interesting anecdote. When Google switched Gmail to use HTTPS, no additional resources were required; no network hardware, no new hosts. It only increased CPU load by about 1%.

Answer 2

I second @erickson: The pure data-transfer speed penalty is negligible. Modern CPUs reach a crypto/AES throughput of several hundred MBit/s. So unless you are on resource constrained system (mobile phone) TLS/SSL is fast enough for slinging data around.

But keep in mind that encryption makes caching and load balancing much harder. This might result in a huge performance penalty.

But connection setup is really a show stopper for many application. On low bandwidth, high packet loss, high latency connections (mobile device in the countryside) the additional roundtrips required by TLS might render something slow into something unusable.

For example we had to drop the encryption requirement for access to some of our internal web apps - they where next to unusable if used from china.

Answer 3

Assuming you don't count connection set-up (as you indicated in your update), it strongly depends on the cipher chosen. Network overhead (in terms of bandwidth) will be negligible. CPU overhead will be dominated by cryptography. On my mobile Core i5, I can encrypt around 250 MB per second with RC4 on a single core. (RC4 is what you should choose for maximum performance.) AES is slower, providing "only" around 50 MB/s. So, if you choose correct ciphers, you won't manage to keep a single current core busy with the crypto overhead even if you have a fully utilized 1 Gbit line. [Edit: RC4 should not be used because it is no longer secure. However, AES hardware support is now present in many CPUs, which makes AES encryption really fast on such platforms.]

Connection establishment, however, is different. Depending on the implementation (e.g. support for TLS false start), it will add round-trips, which can cause noticable delays. Additionally, expensive crypto takes place on the first connection establishment (above-mentioned CPU could only accept 14 connections per core per second if you foolishly used 4096-bit keys and 100 if you use 2048-bit keys). On subsequent connections, previous sessions are often reused, avoiding the expensive crypto.

So, to summarize:

Transfer on established connection:

• Delay: nearly none
• CPU: negligible
• Bandwidth: negligible

First connection establishment:

• Delay: additional round-trips
• Bandwidth: several kilobytes (certificates)
• CPU on client: medium
• CPU on server: high

Subsequent connection establishments:

• Delay: additional round-trip (not sure if one or multiple, may be implementation-dependant)
• Bandwidth: negligible
• CPU: nearly none