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  Cryptographic Accelerators Provide Quick Encryption April 19, 1999 | ||
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Cryptographic Accelerators: Caveat Emptor Can cryptographic accelerators really relieve the crushing burden on your secure Web server? Can you just pop in a card, handle more customers, process transactions faster and rake in the profits? Let the buyer beware. While an accelerator can enhance Web server performance, issues such as hardware configuration are still just as important in boosting your secured server's ability to manage amounts of traffic. Our test results, while not as fantastic as we had anticipated, indicated an increase in response times of up to 28 percent, as well as more clients connecting to our secure Web server. Traditionally, secured Web servers can handle 12 to 15 secured transactions per second. With both nFast and CryptoSwift, that number increased by up to 300 percent. But what about network bandwidth? With only a single Ethernet connection, heavy network traffic caused collisions and created congestion. Increasing the server's ability to process transactions does not mean it can accept more network connections; it simply speeds up the transaction process. Cryptographic accelerators generally act in the same manner as math coprocessors. Accelerators implement a specific set of functions usually handled by software at the hardware level. By encoding these functions in silicon, hardware performs these tasks much faster--and more often. A Web server bogged down by intensive algorithmic calculations, like those required during the key exchange between Web server and client, can not respond as quickly to requests, and often fails to respond at all. This behavior results in numerous time-out errors, not to mention frustrated customers. If your secured Web server's response time is low, and its CPU consumes most of its resources while processing transactions, a cryptographic accelerator may relieve some of the stress and enhance the server's overall performance.
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