[NNTP] Re: Comments on draft-ietf-nntp-tls-nntp-05.txt

[Forrest J. Cavalier III]

Andrew Gierth wrote:

>>>>>>"EKR" == EKR  <ekr at rtfm.com> writes:
> 
> 
>  >> Well, nondisclosure limits how much I can say, but it's
>  >> unquestionably true that (a) traffic levels of many gigabits are
>  >> the norm rather than the exception in the commercial Usenet
>  >> provider industry (which is a very significant user of
>  >> authenticated NNTP connections, and more importantly also has a
>  >> major effect on client development) and (b) the CPU cost of
>  >> encrypting all that, purely to protect the password, is not
>  >> something that can simply be absorbed.
> 
>  EKR> Yeah, this falls more into the category of assertion than data. 
> 
> What sort of data would you like?
> 

Does Andrew need to disclose CPU loads to make this point?

A rough estimate of throughput on a GigE is 100MB/second. At that
rate, with a 3.2 GHz processor clock, you get 32 clock cycles per byte
on average.  Those 32 clock cycles are precious:  to the
extent that you don't fill the I/O pipe, you need/waste hardware
resources (network and CPU.)

The real cost of encrypting is higher because the memory bus
runs at a slower speed.