Objectives
The objective of these tests is to show the advantage of hardware cryptographic features provided by IBM® System z. The performance of different IBM Java™ versions is also measured.
The environment consists of:
- One IBM System z® LPAR running Linux® and the JSSE client test program
- A second IBM System z LPAR running Linux and the JSSE server test program
- Both LPARs are connected with a HiperSockets™ connection
The objectives include:
- Describe how the setup was done for this test, as a guideline for similar scenarios.
- Measure the throughput and CPU load with four different ciphers, when scaling the packet size using software and hardware encryption. Throughput consists of the number of packets multiplied by the number of bytes of data in each packet, and divided by the run time in seconds.
- Compare throughput and CPU utilization for JSSE in hardware encryption mode with and without a polling thread.
- Compare hardware and software encryption of SSL handshakes when varying the logon methods (cached, client authentication).
- Study the performance under Java 5.0, comparing the SR9 release to the SR7 release, and to Java 6.0 SR4.
This information can help IT architects understand the performance characteristics of hardware and software encryption using the IBM Java Secure Sockets Extension (IBM JSSE2), as provided by the IBM Java 5.0 SDK (Software Developer's toolkit).