On Apr 24, 2008, at 8:48 PM, Mark Crispin wrote:
This is my opinion only:
I believe that a software implementation on a general-purpose
processor will always have superior price/performance to a special-
purpose processor; and furthermore that the performance (as opposed
to price/performance) of a software implementation on a general-
purpose processor will exceed that of a special-purpose processor
before the special-purpose processor is fully depreciated.
Advances in general-purpose processors have just been progressing
too quickly, and the premiums on special-purpose processors are just
too high.
While above may well be true for new equipment - I've found adding a
HiFN card to FreeBSD or OpenBSD or nChiper or CryptoSwift to Solaris
to just offload the initial setup exchange very close to being a
"magic silver bullet solution". Which gives you a few months of time
to plan for a proper upgrade or what not. On MacOSX and Linux the
situation is far from clear cut - as other issues in the bus, DMA, irq
handling and IP stack muddle things.
However two things w.r.t. to IMAP -- depending on your situation -
your connections may be long lived - and if that is the case -
benefits are not all that noticable (percentages rather than orders).
If they are not - consider if you can make them long lived. Once they
are in the 20+ minute length - the SSL overhead is neglectable.
Secondly - depending on your situation -- dropping down to something
like RC4 can make quite difference if it is pure flat CPU for very
long lived connections.
Dw
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