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We are moving from Windows 2003 IIS 6 to Windows 2012 IIS 8. When moving over to the 2012 we have seen a slow down of the website of at least 10 times and sometimes more under load.

Initial testing shows that encrypted pages are slower, however unencrypted pages are much faster on 2012.

I would like to bench mark the time taken to setup a SSL connection to prove or disprove SSL is the cause of the problem. What is the best way of doing a benchmark on SSL?

I was hoping to find a browser plugin that would provide the total time taken to do the SSL handshake, but have been unable to find anything.

Any tools or advise would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Just time the site with SSL on vs SSL off that should give you the data you need. What sort of encryption are you using, 2048 bit? Nov 19, 2013 at 12:04
  • @DrewKhoury We can't turn SSL off, as the issue only happens in the live system. Yes we are using 2048 for both 2003 and 2012 servers. Nov 19, 2013 at 12:06
  • benchmarking usually involves testing things in different environments. Is there a technical reason why you can't setup a test environment with SSL? Nov 19, 2013 at 12:09
  • @DrewKhoury we have a test environment, however when we test against the test environment everything runs fine. The 2012 test environment was installed from the same image as live and the setup is almost identical. What I would like to do is benchmark the live 2003 against the live 2012. If the SSL handshake is fast enough I will know to look somewhere else. Nov 19, 2013 at 12:19

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I haven't tried this myself but a few minutes of searching resulted in the following:

sslswamp

http://linux.die.net/man/1/sslswamp

swamp is a utility that can be used to test and/or benchmark SSL/TLS servers. It is quite configurable and allows for various different characteristics of the server's behaviour to be tested.

This is how you would use it:

swamp -connect IP:www.localnet:443

ab - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool

You may want to look into Apache ab, even though they only have an experimental SSL feature.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/ab.html

-s When compiled in (ab -h will show you) use the SSL protected https rather than the http protocol. This feature is experimental and very rudimentary. You probably do not want to use it.

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