nginx ssl handshake vs apache

[Igor Sysoev]

On Apr 20, 2014, at 21:17 , Lukas Tribus wrote:

>> Hi
>> 
>> I was watching this video by fastly ceo http://youtu.be/zrSvoQz1GOs?t=24m44s
>> he talks about the nginx ssl handshake versus apache and comes to the
>> conclusion that apache was more efficient at mass handshakes due to
>> nginx blocking while it calls back to openssl
>> 
>> I was hoping to get other people's opinion on this and find out if what
>> he says is accurate or not
> 
> I would be interested in opinions/statements about this as well.

nginx worker blocks on SSL handshake as well as on disk I/O. But in contrast
to the disk I/O during the handshake you can not do anything else on this CPU
at this time until CPU time share slice will end for the current process/thread.
If a typical time share slice is 1ms and the 1024-bit key handshake time is 0.5ms
then the chances that another process/thread is able to run on the same CPU are 25%.
The lesser handshake time the lesser chances.


-- 
Igor Sysoev
http://nginx.com