in reply to Re^2: SSL on PerlMonks
in thread SSL on PerlMonks
I know that using https seriously impaired the caching on my home squid-cache. On https sites, the caching fell to zero on sites that used https to encrypt the setting.
It used to be that, depending on the site and site-type, I might get a 20-30% speed boost from my home cache mostly in lowering numbers of requests for common items like icons, style sheets and pictures. On news sites, I saw as much 30+%.
I've restored some or most of that by using an SSL-bump proxy to decrypt & store... visiting a few news sites & looking at my caching rates: 25% (396/1557) requests were served via local cache, with 21% (20MB/94MB) of the traffic-by-bytes. Since I don't have Gigabit fiber @ home, that saves a noticeable chunk of time.
My housemate noticed a major speed bump on You-Tube -- relating to the previews -- before, about 20 seconds/page, after, less than 2-3 seconds/page -- related to the previews (and the way they paged forward & back amongst the static preview images.
One of the best example types which I've hit more than once is downloading large CD and/or DVD images from large SW vendors due to my max disk-cache object size being 2GB. One time I pulled down a 700+MB image from Microsoft -- *TWICE* -- having forgotten about the previous download -- nearly 2 months before. Couldn't figure out how I could download such a large file @ 200-300MB/s -- until I found it had been served from cache and I eventually found the previous place I downloaded it to.
My main gripe is that this appears to be more about tracking 'traffic' and 'hits' than about security, which is actually *lowered* with more proxy-using sites being forced to decrypt HTTPS because of the large number of sites switching to HTTPS. Before -- HTTPS represented "sensitive" sites -- financial and maybe medical, but now, it represents "casual reading" of news and social sites. To continue caching and work-place monitoring of http usage, decoding https seems like its becoming an requirement. ;-(
Anyway, no preference, for me, which way this site goes given my proxy, but for those who don't have such -- probably no big deal on this site (given that's it's mostly text) anyway...