[QGIS-Developer] SSL Performance Overhead

[Martin Dobias]

Hi Matthias

On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 8:48 AM Matthias Kuhn <matthias at opengis.ch> wrote:
>
> The documentation currently promises "massive speed-ups in PostGIS layer
> rendering" with SSL disabled. [1]
>
> [...]
>
> Is there anyone who knows why this sentence was introduced? And if there
> is (still) an issue with performance when using SSL?

As Jurgen has commented on the pull request already, we have figured
out that QGIS was taking a lot more time to access features from a
local PostgreSQL database compared to some other app (uDig?). I have
dug out an old mail with the measurement - the difference was ~12
seconds to fetch data in QGIS vs ~4 seconds to fetch data in the other
app. In the end we figured out that disabling encryption removed that
penalization. All that was back in 2009 :-)

Unless there have been some improvements in the server/client lib, I
think the promise of massive speed up is still valid... And as Andreas
mentions, most(?) of the time people use the DB on a local network, so
it should not be a big deal to send data on local network unencrypted.

Cheers
Martin