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

[Brian E Carpenter]

Sure, encryption and decryption on fat pipes is expensive.
That's a well understood problem where I work. But is
there anything specific to NNTP in this observation? Why would
NNTP deserve a get out of jail card, and not other
applications protocols?

    Brian

Forrest J. Cavalier III wrote:
> 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.
> 
>