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Comment by profmonocle | Hacker News Reader

> The most obvious example is that you don't want to bog down your countrys civil defence agency with SSL/TLS protocol negotiations, if their website is being deluged by people trying to survive a natural disaster.

If TLS overhead is the last straw that brings down a web site, the site's infrastructure isn't suitable for delivering safety-critical information.

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This. Google measured TLS overhead on their servers – it was very small. If you can do TLS on Google scale, you can do it anywhere.

It really depends on what your bottleneck is. If your bottle neck is already CPU, then TLS is not that big of a deal. If, OTOH, your bottleneck is disk, then implementing TLS can create substantial overhead.

What?

How does TLS increase disk usage?

there's more to it than that I guess.

TLS adds quite a bit of memory overhead, it increases the network bandwidth due to padding, and if your CPU is eqipped with AES extensions (modern ones) then you still do compression usually.

it can be difficult to cache certain things with TLS also- since you can't do transparent caching. (although this is more a problem for those running squid proxies at work on a stretched out line).

TLS is certainly an overhead and it's not required in cases where I'm checking a bulletin about earthquakes.

How so? If your bottleneck is disk, you probably have quite some CPU cycles to spare, because the CPU is waiting for I/O most of the time.

Are you willing to pay increased taxes, so that FEMA (Or your countrys similar) can afford to run 100.000 servers, in order to "do TLS on Google scale", so that they can get emergency orders out for civil defence ?

Have your forgotten (or maybe never seen ?) CNN's traffic graph from 9/11 ?

Experience so far is that emergency services web-pages tend to die the instant they are most needed. Addint TLS will just make that happen even more.

> Are you willing to pay increased taxes, so [...] that they can get emergency orders out for civil defence ?

Unquestionably, yes.

You really need to update your facts. CPU overhead is already less than 1%. https://istlsfastyet.com/

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