RE: Linux kernel 2.4 and TCP terminations per second.

[Imran Badr]

I am not worried about SSL handshakes/sec. I am looking forward to how much
http/sec I could extract out of a moderate linux box. I have a dell box with
PIII 800 MHz, 256 MB RAM running a very light weight server (which I wrote)
and I wanted to find out how much time does it spend in system for TCP
terminations. The system in running linux kernel version 2.4.2

The server sits in a loop and launches worker threads as it receives a tcp
socket connection. The worker thread then sits in an infinite loop and
sends/receives data from client (which is again a custom client).
I figured out that most of the CPU time was spent in the kernel mode for TCP
terminatiions and Network was not the bottleneck.

-----Original Message-----
From: [e-mail]
[mailto:[e-mail]]On Behalf Of Roland Dreier
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2001 3:44 PM
To: [e-mail]
Cc: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Linux kernel 2.4 and TCP terminations per second.

    Imran> I am running openssl with apache using modssl. I will have
    Imran> to look at whether could I use openssl with TUX or zeus.

If you are doing SSL termination without a hardware crypto accelerator
then the cost of the public key operations for the SSL handshake will
far outweigh the cost of TCP termination and the webserver.  With a
typical machine (say a 1 GHz P3) I would estimate you could do 200 SSL
handshakes/sec with apache/modssl (with 95% of your CPU time spent in
OpenSSL RSA code).  With a hardware crypto accelerator you could get
up to 600-1000 handshakes/sec but the crypto will still be the
bottleneck.

Roland