[pmwiki-users] Performance hit from using SSL

Randy randy at brownragfilms.com
Thu Feb 14 11:01:11 CST 2008


Can anyone give me an idea of how many seconds of increased response  
time to expect when using SSL with PmWiki? Or at least what the  
factors are and what range of impact SSL could have?

I don't really understand how SSL works. My wild guess is: (1) there  
is some kind of certificate check on the server; (2) the html is  
encrypted by the server; (3) the html is decrypted by the user's  
browser.

I imagine the speed of the host's certificate checking is a factor  
that can't be known for sure - assume I've got or am willing to find a  
speedy host.

My site does lots of processing to construct each page, but I  
currently (without SSL) almost always get pages back in under 2  
seconds - which is acceptable. I don't expect more than a small  
handful of people to be accessing the site at a given moment, so I'm  
not worrying about thousands of simultaneous hits.

Is it likely that SSL would add less than 0.5 seconds per page?

Will 256-bit encryption be noticeably slower than 128-bit encryption?

Thanks in advance for your advice: it may spare me the expense of  
buying certificates and testing.

Randy

P.S. I realize that I can choose to use SSL for selected pages -  
assume that I'm using it for the entire wiki. 



More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list