Slow Https response in Jetty

Question

I'm using servlets 3 with jetty 8.1.1 and the SslContextFactory on an amazon ec2 machine (m1-small).

• The first HTTPS request from localhost (of the amazone machine) is about 150ms and further requests seem to get faster (down to ~40ms) but not as close as to the HTTP response time of only 20ms - why? Is encryption really that slow?

• Also when comparing HTTPS and HTTP from outside of the amazon cloud the difference gets even worse: HTTPS requests are at least 400ms slower!? How can that be? Is the encrypted content also bigger? And how can I debug it or make all faster?

Some more informations: all 'measurements' are unscientificly done via time curl http://mydomain.com/ping but are reproducable. Also there is an ec2 load balancer in between. I'm sure I've configured something wrong or there is a big misunderstanding from me. Let me know!

Answer 1

• update to 8.1.7
• check the time from localhost on the aws machine for reference
• check using the IP vs DNS, quite often those sorts of long pauses involve dns issues
• set your /etc/hosts to bypass a DNS look for host as a test as well
• -Dorg.eclipse.jetty.LEVEL=DEBUG on the server side to enable debug, should help your correlate the roundtrip inside of jetty and compare to actual network results
• ssl decryption does incur some performance hit, hard to say that that would be all of your differences here though
• odds are this is not specific to jetty but something in the environment, which hopefully some bullet above will help steer you in the right direction

Answer 2

I need to find out how to enable SSL sessions. For this I've created a new question as it is unclear how to turn on in jetty and how to handle on the client side