Hi all, I have a question regarding server performance when a SSL certificate is in use:

Our company just purchased a SSL certificate and successfully installed the certificate in Apache2, but now it seems that some pages and our applets are loading slower that they used to. Though isn't so apparent with our page loads, applet load time has nearly doubled. Is this due to the SSL encryption? What can we do to improve performance in this situation?

Thanks!

Just configure Apache to offer a faster encryption algorithm. This may not always work since the algorithm used is negotiated between client and server, but removing the more "expensive" algorithms _should_ prevent clients from asking for it. If you goal is authentication rather than encryption then SSL/TLS can be configured for that. Decide your security requirements and configure Apache to offer appropriate algorithms.

You may also want to check how clients access the certificate chain. The simplest method is to have Apache blindly send it's own certificate and, in order, all intermediate certificates up to a certificate that the client "trusts". If there are a large number of large certificates then this can consume a fair chunk of bandwidth on each "new" connection. The alternativeis for the client to request each intermediate certificate as required. This could be even slower.

You might want to consider mixing http content on https pages to reduce the encryption overhead. It does mean updating all the URLs.