[offtopic] Re: Opinion on Acceleration effort

[Jon Stevens <jo...@latchkey.com>]

on 5/31/2000 6:33 AM, Serge Knystautas at sergek@lokitech.com wrote:

> Just because I thought this was interesting... I read the latest
> Netscape (iPlanet) web server (enterprise 4.0?) supports using a
> hardware accelerator to handle the encryption.  I've noticed that
> encryption takes the biggest of CPU of anything I ever run on a web
> server.  I figure other web servers will support this sooner or later if
> it's really useful.

according to a couple people i have talked to, those cards that are sold for
ssl encryption don't really do squat.

moving that amount of data back and forth over the pci bus just isn't fast
enough. if it was, they would probably make hard disks that plugged into the
pci bus. :-)

having been to etrade's NOC before...i know that their solution was to
simply have around 400 sparc's and a bunch of load balancing. :-) i love it
when people throw more hardware at the problem. the head guy there had a few
of the encryption cards laying around, but wasn't really using them...

-jon (not a hardware expert by any means)