How much is the HTTPS overhead

Server NGINX
1

Hi,

I am running a RoR application with the signup/login page protected by
https. It doesn’t look like it, but that’s super painful to maintain.

So I was considering to entirely protect my application so that the RoR
doesn’t have to know about ssl and redirection to protected pages,
however I’d like to know how much overhead is added.

Thanks for your answers

2

So I was considering to entirely protect my application
so that the RoR
doesn’t have to know about ssl and redirection to
protected pages,
however I’d like to know how much overhead is added.

good question but here is maybe not the right place for it as thats a
very
general topic and not nginx related.

id further recommend you to learn using google :wink: 20 seconds of googling
gives you a lot of information to that topic, for example here:

greetings

3

It will use a bit more cpu. If you’re serving static content, you may
notice the difference in cpu usage. If you’re using a heavy RoR app,
then it shouldn’t increase total system utilization more than 10-20%.
I was running a pretty heavy cgi proxy, and the difference between SSL
and not SSL was just barely noticable in my cpu cacti graphs. So yes,
a bit more cpu, but certainly it’s not going to increase your hosting
costs dramatically.

4

If you use nginx on the front end, you can have some really long
keepalives, which will reduce the number of connections set up and
torn down. This will probably make the impact on performance
negligible.

5

Thanks for your input.

It seems a major hit can happen if there are plenty small requests.

Hmm, I’ll have to find a way to simplify the https handling in my rails
app then.