SSL and CPU performance

Public key encryption is a CPU-intensive operation, especially for the server, because it must decrypt the secret symmetric key during the SSL handshake. These operations can take more than 500 milliseconds to complete. To prevent SSL from monopolizing the CPU, the z/TPF system has enabled the CPU-intensive sections of the SSL code for time slicing.

SSL uses hardware to perform cryptographic operations if the cipher algorithm in use is supported by a hardware accelerator.