AW: RE: slow https performance compared to http

[Robert Paprocki]

> Enabling keepalive on ab is one of the things you can do. I don't know
> ab, so not sure if there is a better way. I also do not know if ab supports
> SSL session caching or TLS tickets, which you would have to keep in
> mind when benchmarking.

ab does not support TLS tickets (you can verify this with wireshark), so even if you do enable HTTP keepalive, the full TLS handshake has to be performed for each request. 

it's a poor tool to measure total potential throughout of HTTPS servers.