This paper describes a new methodology to characterize a web servers ability to serve secure content. Specifically, measuring a server's scalability and sensitivity to dynamic variations in content due to multiple site serving and/or changes in end user interactions. This is done by defining and measuring SSL (TSL) performance with a new metric for evaluation, namely, ``Percent ID Reuse''. Varying this parameter and monitoring the resultant Transactions per Second will provide quantitative results describing the effectiveness of a secure server architecture to support specific types of content and/or access pattern profiles. A single value of the Percent ID Reuse at the ``half serving point'' provides an indication of the servers sensitivity to variations in content. To demonstrate the new technique we measure our ability to ``desensitize'' our content server to SSL activity by offloading it to a dedicated array of SSL Protocol specific servers and measuring their performance.
By: Ronald Mraz, Karen Witting, Paul M. Dantzig
Published in: RC22323 in 2002
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