Will HTTPS slow down page loads of my web application?

Question

Will SSL Encryption slow down page load? If so, how do I estimate the impact on performance for my web application?

Answer 1

This is a possible duplicate of several questions:

• What is the overhead of using HTTPS compared to HTTP?
• HTTP vs HTTPS performance
• How much overhead does SSL impose?

The last includes this answer, including: "non-SSL sockets are less than 10 times faster than SSL sockets". However, this can be a bit misleading - be sure to read the entire answer.

You can also mitigate the performance concern, at least on the server-side, by offloading the SSL processing to another device, e.g. a dedicated load balancer or firewall.