There was a good discussion about it on stack overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/548029/how-much-overhead-does-ssl-impose http://stackoverflow.com/que

There was a good discussion about it on stack overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/548029/how-much-overhead-does-ssl-impose http://stackoverflow.com/questions/548029/how-much-overhead-... The bottom line is that with keep-alive connections, the overhead should be less of a problem, since the only expensive part is the initial RSA key generation.