HTTP vs HTTPS (Concurrent Connections)

Posted on April 29, 2017 at 6:42 pm

I wanted to test if HTTPS is more “heavy” on the server than HTTP and how many concurrent connections can handle compare with HTTP. With HTTPS the web server has to decrypt data and I wanted to see what is the difference between using HTTPS and HTTP on a web server running Nginx 1.12.0, PHP 7.0.18 (PHP7.0-FPM), MySQL 15.1 Distrib 10.1.22-MariaDB, Redis 3.2.8. I used Loader.io to test the server with 1000 concurrent connections.

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Nginx Static Content Test (Concurrent Connections)
MySQL vs Redis (Concurrent Connections)

SSL (HTTPS) Enabled

SSL (HTTPS) Disabled

Conclusion

As you can see, the server performance was not that different in the server to handle HTTPS requests compared to HTTP requests. The CPU usage was like 12\13% in both cases. However, the number of requests is different, the server handled in HTTPS approximately 50K connections less than in HTTP. That is not a big deal, my personal comment is that regarding server performance it is not that different, and regarding connections, HTTP is a little faster (86ms response time vs 91ms of HTTPS), but almost same.

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