System-wide anatomy and tuning of a SPECweb SSL server

In this paper we present system-wide analysis and performance tuning of a SPECweb SSL server. We focus on the banking workload of SPECweb because this workload is 100% SSL-enabled and thus designed to evaluate the SSL web server performance and capacity. In order to gain insight into the unique characteristics of a SPECweb banking server, we conduct extensive experiments and present module and function-level anatomy data. Based on our results, we propose methods for tuning up the server performance, alleviating some of the bottlenecks. One of our main results is that the SPECweb banking workload may not always be a realistic environment for measuring the capacity of an SSL server, due to the fact that it is burdened with overheads which are not related to cryptography and can be removed.