If performance is so important that you can't encrypt your login form,
then you probably shouldn't be using a language that runs 50x slower
than C. (Just to be clear; all my web applications are this slow
too. But I enable SSL.)
As always, it depends what your app is doing. I've got a realtime event hanling solution where the performance dips close to 50% when you turn SSL on simply because of the handshake times.
So we shouldn't use python, perl, or php either? The last time I checked, all of these languages are at least 30x slower than C.