Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Impact on Web Server Performance
Mohammed A. Alnatheer · Journal of Advances in Computer Networks · 2014
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. I. INTRODUCTIONLocal Area Network (LAN) was used to conduct our experiment.It is well known SSL consumes too much time encrypting and decrypting to protect the exchange of the privacy key.Also, the handshake protocol consumes significant resources by exchanging information.Depending upon the performance aspects, SSL could cause a major, impact on the windows web server performance.For example, SSL decreases some software performance counters such as CPU utilization, link utilization, packets per second, memory usage, etc.On the other hand, SSL might not affect other counters such as physical disk, page fault per second.Therefore, we will experiment with multiple counters to study and measure SSL impacts on the Windows web server performance with different counters such as processors, memory, network and physical disk.In the next section we will discuss the related work to our project.In the following section, we will discuss the overview of SSL, following by how SSL secures a transaction, and SSL task outline.Then, we will discuss experiment setup, performance measurements, and performance counters.Afterwards, we will explain our results.In the last section, we will discuss our conclusion and