As web page loading times continue to increase during an intensive SSL processing session, customers have even less patience. Web site delays from SSL processing overload also creates frustrated users that hit reload on the Web browser initiating even more SSL connections, which further degrade the site's performance. Most Web servers are not designed to perform these calculations in addition to providing normal page retrieval services. SSL content can be delivered up to 50 times slower than typical HTTP content. Providing secure services not only impairs the performance of a web server, it contributes to increased downtime and reduces the server's life span.
Overworked processors are notoriously unstable.
This instability leads to crashes, which are a catastrophe when servers of any kind are involved, especially those responsible for secure data processing. These devices let Web sites satisfy performance and security requirements by offloading the SSL processing burden from Web servers. SSL accelerators are optimized devices built to handle the CPU-intensive requirements of processing encryption and decryption. An SSL accelerator can process up to 50 times as many SSL sessions as a standard Web server. With the SSL processing offloaded from Web servers, the servers are free to process page requests and support database lookups.