HTTP vs HTTPS performance

Question

Are there any major differences in performance between http and https   I seem to recall reading that HTTPS can be a fifth as fast as HTTP   Is this valid with the current generation webservers browsers   If so  are there any whitepapers to support it

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Here s a great article  a little bit old  but still great  on SSL handshake latency  Helped me identifying SSL as the main cause of slowness for clients who were using my app through slow Internet connections   http   www semicomplete com blog geekery ssl-latency html

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In a number of cases the performance impact of SSL handshakes will be mitigated by the fact that the SSL session can be cached on both ends  desktop and server   On Windows machines for example the SSL session can be cached for up to 10 hours   See  http   support microsoft com kb 247658 EN-US    Some SSL accelerators will also have parameters allowing you to tune the time the session is cached   Another impact to consider is that static content served over HTTPS will not be cached by proxies  and this may reduce performance across multiple users accessing the site over the same proxy   This can be mitigated by the fact that static content will be cached at desktops as well  Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 cache cacheable HTTPS static content unless instructed to do otherwise  Tools Menu Internet Options Advanced Security Do not save encrypted pages to disk

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Since I am investigating same problem for my project  I found these slides  Older but interesting   http   www cs nyu edu artg research comparison comparison slides sld001 htm

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There s a very simple answer to this  Profile the performance of your web server to see what the performance penalty is for your particular situation  There are several tools out there to compare the performance of an HTTP vs HTTPS server  JMeter and Visual Studio come to mind  and they are quite easy to use   No one can give you a meaningful answer without some information about the nature of your web site  hardware  software  and network configuration   As others have said  there will be some level of overhead due to encryption  but it is highly dependent on    Hardware  Server software  Ratio of dynamic vs static content  Client distance to server Typical session length  Etc  my personal favorite  Caching behavior of clients   In my experience  servers that are heavy on dynamic content tend to be impacted less by HTTPS because the time spent encrypting  SSL-overhead  is insignificant compared to content generation time   Servers that are heavy on serving a fairly small set of static pages that can easily be cached in memory suffer from a much higher overhead  in one case  throughput was havled on an  intranet     Edit  One point that has been brought up by several others is that SSL handshaking is the major cost of HTTPS  That is correct  which is why  typical session length  and  caching behavior of clients  are important    Many  very short sessions means that handshaking time will overwhelm any other performance factors  Longer sessions will mean the handshaking cost will be incurred at the start of the session  but subsequent requests will have relatively low overhead   Client caching can be done at several steps  anywhere from a large-scale proxy server down to the individual browser cache  Generally HTTPS content will not be cached in a shared cache  though a few proxy servers can exploit a man-in-the-middle type behavior to achieve this   Many browsers cache HTTPS content for the current session and often times across sessions  The impact the not-caching or less caching means clients will retrieve the same content more frequently  This results in more requests and bandwidth to service the same number of users

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HTTPS requires an initial handshake which can be very slow  The actual amount of data transferred as part of the handshake isn t huge  under 5 kB typically   but for very small requests  this can be quite a bit of overhead  However  once the handshake is done  a very fast form of symmetric encryption is used  so the overhead there is minimal  Bottom line  making lots of short requests over HTTPS will be quite a bit slower than HTTP  but if you transfer a lot of data in a single request  the difference will be insignificant   However  keepalive is the default behaviour in HTTP 1 1  so you will do a single handshake and then lots of requests over the same connection  This makes a significant difference for HTTPS  You should probably profile your site  as others have suggested  to make sure  but I suspect that the performance difference will not be noticeable

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There is a way to measure this   The tool from apache called jmeter will measure throughput   If you set up a large sampling of your service with jmeter  in a controlled environment  with and without SSL  you should get an accurate comparison of the relative cost   I would be interested in your results

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December 2014 Update  You can easily test the difference between HTTP and HTTPS performance in your own browser using the HTTP vs HTTPS Test website by AnthumChris     This page measures its load time over unsecure HTTP and encrypted HTTPS connections  Both pages load 360 unique  non-cached images  2 04 MB total       The results may surprise you   It s important to have an up to date knowledge about the HTTPS performance because the Let   s Encrypt Certificate Authority will start issuing free  automated  and open SSL certificates in Summer 2015  thanks to Mozilla  Akamai  Cisco  Electronic Frontier Foundation and IdenTrust   June 2015 Update  Updates on Let   s Encrypt - Arriving September 2015    Let s Encrypt Launch Schedule  Jun 16  2015  Let s Encrypt Root and Intermediate Certificates  Jun 4  2015  Draft Let s Encrypt Subscriber Agreement  May 21  2015    More info on Twitter   letsencrypt  For more info on HTTPS and SSL TLS performance see    Is TLS Fast Yet  High Performance Browser Networking  Chapter 4  Transport Layer Security  Overclocking SSL Anatomy and Performance of SSL Processing   For more info on the importance of using HTTPS see    Why HTTPS for Everything   The HTTPS-Only Standard  Let   s Encrypt  Internet Security Research Group  HTTPS Everywhere  Electronic Frontier Foundation    To sum it up  let me quote Ilya Grigorik   TLS has exactly one performance problem  it is not used widely enough  Everything else can be optimized    Thanks to Chris - author of the HTTP vs HTTPS Test benchmark - for his comments below

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There isn t a single answer for this   Encryption will always consume more CPU   This can be offloaded to dedicated hardware in many cases  and the cost will vary by algorithm selected   3des is more expensive than AES  for example   Some algorithms are more expensive for the encrypter than the decryptor   Some have the opposite cost   More expensive than the bulk crypto is handshake cost   New connections will consume much more CPU   This can be reduced with session resumption  at the cost of keeping old session secrets around until they expire   This means that small requests from a client that doesn t come back for more are the most expensive   For cross internet traffic you may not notice this cost in your data rate  because the bandwidth available is too low   But you will certainly notice it in CPU usage on a busy server

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The overhead is NOT due to the encryption  On a modern CPU  the encryption required by SSL is trivial   The overhead is due to the SSL handshakes  which are lengthy and drastically increase the number of round-trips required for a HTTPS session over a HTTP one   Measure  using a tool such as Firebug  the page load times while the server is on the end of a simulated high-latency link  Tools exist to simulate a high latency link - for Linux there is  netem   Compare HTTP with HTTPS on the same setup   The latency can be mitigated to some extent by    Ensuring that your server is using HTTP keepalives - this allows the client to reuse SSL sessions  which avoids the need for another handshake Reducing the number of requests to as few as possible - by combining resources where possible  e g   js include files  CSS  and encouraging client-side caching Reduce the number of page loads  e g  by loading data not required into the page  perhaps in a hidden HTML element  and then showing it using client-script

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Is TLS fast yet  Yes     Watch  https   www youtube com watch v 0EB7zh 7UE4 Read  https   istlsfastyet com    There are many projects out there that aim to blur the lines and to make HTTPS just as fast  Like SPDY and mod-spdy

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In a number of cases the performance impact of SSL handshakes will be mitigated by the fact that the SSL session can be cached on both ends  desktop and server   On Windows machines for example the SSL session can be cached for up to 10 hours   See  http   support microsoft com kb 247658 EN-US    Some SSL accelerators will also have parameters allowing you to tune the time the session is cached   Another impact to consider is that static content served over HTTPS will not be cached by proxies  and this may reduce performance across multiple users accessing the site over the same proxy   This can be mitigated by the fact that static content will be cached at desktops as well  Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 cache cacheable HTTPS static content unless instructed to do otherwise  Tools Menu Internet Options Advanced Security Do not save encrypted pages to disk

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I made a small experiment and got 16  time difference for the same image from flickr  233 kb    http   farm8 staticflickr com 7405 13368635263 d792fc1189 b jpg   https   farm8 staticflickr com 7405 13368635263 d792fc1189 b jpg    Of course these numbers depends on many factors  such as computer performance  connection speed  server load  QoS on path  the particular network path taken from browser to the server  but it shows the general idea  HTTPS is slowser then HTTP  since it requesres more operations to complete  SSL handshaking and  encoding decoding data

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To really understand how HTTPS will increase your latency  you have to understand how HTTPS connections are established   Here is a nice diagram   The key is that instead of the client getting the data after 2  legs   one round trip  you send a request  the server sends a response   the client won t get data until at least 4 legs  2 round trips    So  if it takes 100 ms for a packet to move between the client and the server  your first HTTPS request will take at least 500 ms     Of course  this can be mitigated by re-using the HTTPS connection  which browsers should do   but it does explain part of that initial stall when loading up an HTTPS web site

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The HTTPS indeed affects page speed     The quotes above reveal the foolishness of many people about site security and speed  HTTPS   SSL server handshaking creates an initial stall in making Internet connections  There   s a slow delay before anything starts to render on your visitor   s browser screen  This delay is measured in Time-to-First-Byte information   HTTPS handshake overhead appears in Time-to-First-Byte information  TTFB   Common TTFB ranges from under 100 milliseconds  best-case  to over 1 5 seconds  worst case   But  of course  with HTTPS it   s 500 milliseconds worse   Roundtrip  wireless 3G connections can be 500 milliseconds or more  The extra trips double delays to 1 second or more  This is a big  negative impact on mobile performance  Very bad news   My advice  if you re not exchanging sensitive data then you don t need SSL at all  but if you do like an ecommerce website then you can just enable HTTPS on certain pages where sensitive data is exchanged like Login and checkout   Source  Pagepipe

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There seems to be a nasty edge case here   Ajax over congested wifi   Ajax usually means that the KeepAlive has timed out after say 20 seconds  However  the wifi means that the  ideally fast  ajax connection has to make multiple round trips  Worse  the wifi often loses packets  and there are TCP retransmits  In this case  HTTPS performs really really badly

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The current top answer is not fully correct    As others have pointed out here  https requires handshaking and therefore does more TCP IP roundtrips    In a WAN environment typically then the latency becomes the limiting factor and not the increased CPU usage on the server    Just keep in mind that the latency from Europe to the US can be around 200 ms  torundtrip time     You can easily measure this  for the single user case  with HTTPWatch

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This is almost certainly going to be true given that SSL requires an extra step of encryption that simply isn t required by non-SLL HTTP

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A more important performance difference is that an HTTPS session is ketp open while the user is connected  An HTTP  session  lasts only for a single item request   It you are running a site with a large number of concurrent users  expect to buy a lot of memory

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HTTPS has encryption decryption overhead so it will always be slightly slower   SSL termination is very CPU intensive    If you have devices to offload SSL  the difference in latencies might be barely noticeable depending on the load your servers are under

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In addition to everything mentioned so far  please keep in mind that some  all   web browsers do not store cached content obtained over HTTPS on the local hard-drive for security reasons  This means that from the user s perspective pages with plenty of static content will appear to load slower after the browser is restarted  and from your server s perspective the volume of requests for static content over HTTPS will be higher than would have been over HTTP

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Browsers can accept HTTP 1 1 protocol with either HTTP or HTTPS  yet browsers can only handle HTTP 2 0 protocol with HTTPS  The protocol differences from HTTP 1 1 to HTTP 2 0 make HTTP 2 0  on average  4-5 times faster than HTTP 1 1  Also  of sites that implement HTTPS  most do so over the HTTP 2 0 protocol  Therefore  HTTPS is almost always going to be faster than HTTP simply due to the different protocol it generally uses  However  if HTTP over HTTP 1 1 is compared with HTTPS over HTTP 1 1  then HTTP is slightly faster  on average  than HTTPS   Here are some comparisons I ran using Chrome  Ver  64    HTTPS over HTTP 1 1    0 47 seconds average page load time 0 05 seconds slower than HTTP over HTTP 1 1 0 37 seconds slower than HTTPS over HTTP 2 0   HTTP over HTTP 1 1   0 42 seconds average page load time 0 05 seconds faster than HTTPS over HTTP 1 1 0 32 seconds slower than HTTPS over HTTP 2 0   HTTPS over HTTP 2 0   0 10 seconds average load time 0 32 seconds faster than HTTP over HTTP 1 1 0 37 seconds faster than HTTPS over HTTPS 1 1

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The current top answer is not fully correct    As others have pointed out here  https requires handshaking and therefore does more TCP IP roundtrips    In a WAN environment typically then the latency becomes the limiting factor and not the increased CPU usage on the server    Just keep in mind that the latency from Europe to the US can be around 200 ms  torundtrip time     You can easily measure this  for the single user case  with HTTPWatch

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HTTP VS HTTPS PERFORMANCE COMPARISON   I have always associated HTTPS with slower page load times when compared to plain old HTTP  As a web developer  web page performance is important to me and anything that will slow down the performance of my web pages is a no-no   In order to understand the performance implications involved  the diagram below gives you a basic idea of what happens under the hood when you make a request for a resource using HTTPS     As you can see from the diagram above  there are a few extra steps that need to take place when using HTTPS compared to using plain HTTP  When you make a request using HTTPS  a handshake needs to occur in order to verify the authenticity of the request  This handshake is an extra step when compared to an HTTP request and does unfortunately incur some overhead   In order to understand the performance implications and see for myself whether or not the performance impact would be significant  I used this site as a testing platform  I headed over to webpagetest org and used the visual comparison tool to compare this site loading using HTTPS vs HTTP   As you can see from Here is Test video Result using HTTPS did have an impact on my page load times  however the difference is negligible and I only noticed a 300 millisecond difference  It s important to note that these times depend on many factors  such as computer performance  connection speed  server load  and distance from server   Your site may be different  and it is important to test your site thoroughly and check the performance impact involved in switching to HTTPS

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I can tell you  as a dialup user  that the same page over SSL is several times slower than via regular HTTP

[performance] HTTP vs HTTPS performance

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