Performance hit of https, how much? What about cache?

Question

I'm building an asp.net web app with lots of ajax. How much of a performance cost is there in running the entire app in https? What about caching? Are scripts and css cached when served over https? If they're initially served from http, are they available in the https pages?

Thanks

As an example, GMail runs all of their traffic over HTTPS - and last time I checked, the GMail service was fast enough for me =) — Tomas Aschan, Feb 05 '11 at 15:07
Yea but they've got 1.6793 zillion servers; i'll have a few less. — frenchie, Feb 05 '11 at 17:22

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:33

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"In my experience, servers that are heavy on dynamic content tend to be impacted less by HTTPS because the time spent encrypting (SSL-overhead) is insignificant compared to content generation time."

"Making lots of short requests over HTTPS will be quite a bit slower than HTTP, but if you transfer a lot of data in a single request, the difference will be insignificant."

So there should be no major performance hit to your server, but the request times will be longer as you need to handshake every request. BUT you should read for more information: HTTP vs HTTPS performance

edited May 23 '17 at 10:33

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answered Feb 05 '11 at 15:06

Colum

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The question is specifically about _ajax_ sites, where the weight of the content is distributed over many small requests. This might impact the "insignificant" part. – Paul-Jan Feb 05 '11 at 15:11

Performance hit of https, how much? What about cache?

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