Thanks Willy. We also see very bad performance with HW acceleration (but better than what you said). We attribute it to the fact that we can launch only 1 operation at a time in synchronous manner coupled with the high latency of getting data in and out of the VMs. That is why we hope to enable asynchronous mode so we can launch multiple operations simultaneously to the HW and get much better overall throughput despite the latency problem.
Thanks, Eric Sent from my iPhone > On Jan 31, 2016, at 12:16 AM, Willy Tarreau <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 04:09:43PM +0100, Nenad Merdanovic wrote: >> In a decent;y sized environment getting several tens of millions >> requests per day, statistics I gathered show that there is about 85-88% >> of clients that support ECDSA. Using that and TLS keys, switching to >> full HTTPS was barely noticeable when examining the CPU usage. > > I'd like to add that I tested a well-known acceleration card a few > months ago, and that RSA acceleration required a *lot* of processes > (more than 40) for the card to start to provide any benefit over > software, that the key generation latency was *much* higher than in > software, and that ECDSA was slowed down to an unusable rate around > 2 or 3 keys per second. Not to mention that there were a lot of > patches to apply on top of openssl to make it barely usable, and > that prevented us from easily following openssl security updates. So > the only usage this card has is now to take space on the table in > the R&D lab next to the test machines. > > The final point on this is that hardware doesn't follow specification > updates fast enough, and can very quickly end up being counter-productive. > I've already seen some SSL servers being limited by their hardware SSL > accelerators. CPUs are fast and cheap nowadays. Often you'd better > install a heavily multi-core CPU than waste a PCIe slot with such a > card, unless this card is extremely good and you are certain that it > can be flashed to support future algorithms efficiently. > > Just my two cents, > Willy > > This email and any attachments thereto may contain private, confidential, and/or privileged material for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review, copying, or distribution of this email (or any attachments thereto) by others is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender immediately and permanently delete the original and any copies of this email and any attachments thereto.
