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· Jan 20, 2016

Impact on Database Encryption on Message Throughput

#Databases #Security #Encryption #Ensemble

Hi,

I have a client who is considering encryption options in order to comply with a tendering requirement.

Were they to encrypt the production database then what would be a reasonable expectation forthe impact on message throughput. Or possibly more easily answered: what would be the expected impact be on I/O rate and CPU utilization. Are there any benchmarks to which could support an estimate ?

How would this compare with plan B: to use disk encryption ?

Thanks

Discussion (3)1
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David Loveluck · Jan 20, 2016

Robert

when database encryption was first introduced it was determined that for a particular application that  was very I/O intensive (5,000  block read or writes per second) , encryption would add about 4% to the CPU usage and it can add a tiny amount to disk block latency. 

That is an extreme case, so it is probably an upper bound  for any considerations.

In my experience, very few Ensemble solutions are at all IO intensive, with more time spent on network traffic or CPU usage. So I would be surprised if it is possible to measure the difference in your case.

I don't know about disk encryption.

 

dave

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David Loveluck · May 9, 2018

When i wrote this, i was quoting an already old test report. While it may or may not have been correct at the time, it is certainly not relevant or useful today with modern hardware.

The proper story today is that there is a fixed CPU overhead per byte encrypted or decrypted.  

The fractional overhead of a single core  would be approximately the data read or write rate in bytes per second divided by the CPU clock speed in hertz.

So on my current 2.8 GHz laptop reading 100 MBs would take roughly 3.6% of one core. Different chips and data rates would give different results. 

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