performance impact of wire encryption and TDE?

[#1]

How much impact on performance is expected if we do both end to end wire encryption and TDE?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Olivier conducted some tests for a Customer to find out how much performance impact SSL brings to the cluster. His conclusion was that the performance impact is quiet high.

[Link to internal document has been removed]

Here is a summary of the tests:

• Evaluation of performance impact by enabling SSL on Hadoop
• Setup: 4 Datanodes, 1 Namenode, Ambari 1.7, Hadoop 2.6, RedHat 6, RAM 128GB, 8 cores
• All network traffic was encrypted (RPC connections, WebInterfaces, MapReduce shuffe,...)
• Main tests: Copying files from and to HDFS (different file sizes 1-10GB) as well as running Teragen tests; Tests were conducted multiple times
• Result:
  • Performance impact when using RC4 is lower, however still not negligible
  • Sample Result (5 GB file): no SSL ca. 20sec, AES 256bit RC4 ca. 100sec, AES 128bit/256bit 3DES ca. 800sec
  • Wire encryption can cause high performance impact

Turning SSL and TDE on will definitely have a performance impact, as to how much in numbers, I don't know at the moment.

[#3]

thanks guys. SSL impact seems huge. Any numbers on TDE?

[#4]

Jonas, please remove the internal doc link since AnswerHub will eventually be exposed to the public. Thanks for collaborating on our Security Track!