A customer stuffs his shopping cart with goodies from your Web site. Credit card in hand, he waits for a secure connection to consummate the deal. And waits. Finally, short of patience, he dumps the contents and logs off.
It may sound like an e-commerce manager's nightmare, but according to the latest Web server performance statistics, it's an increasingly common phenomenon.
The ghost in the machine is Secure Sockets Layer, the commonly used method of securing communications between users and Web sites.
Recent tests conducted by researcher Networkshop Inc., indicate that powerful Web servers capable of handling hundreds of transactions per second may be brought to a near standstill by heavy SSL traffic. Some server configurations suffered as much as a fifty-fold degradation in performance from SSL, down to just a few transactions per second, according to analyst Alistair Croll at Networkshop.
The growing problem of SSL performance has driven vendors to develop devices that can help share the Web server's processing load. Next month, IPivot Inc., will ship two new processors that can offload authentication and encryption on eCommerce sites.
"It is true the SSL slows down performance of decrypting/encrypting information sent to us from the browser and the results we send back. I don't believe it's a problem for us at the moment until we begin handling hundreds of transactions per send, per server," notes Charlie White, Operations Specialist/Web Support of CrossCheck Inc.
CrossCheck handles huge clients on its server network in California, which is being replicated at the same moment in their Wisconsin data center, to assure maximum scalability and redundancy. CrossCheck's ChecksByNet and CheckNow products are SSL authorizations and need to be very swift with authorization response.
We are told that in addition to a multiple server or IPivot solutions, something such as the Commerce Accelerator 1000-which connects between the router and the Web Server can also help with the problem.
