I've just turned on SSL on our Web site and have found 2 serious
problems.  I'm hoping someone can help.

The box has a Compaq SSL accelerator card so there *should* be good
performance!

Problem number one is that over modem connections the overall speed is
well down - like about 70% worse than the same page non -SSL.  The pages
have lots of graphics, but I wasn=92t expecting an increase from 20 to 35
seconds=85.  Over a cable link the time is 3 seconds rather than 2 so it's
not a server side latency problem!

A check of traffic indicates that the effective bit rate is well down
(under SSL) and I was wondering if this might be something to do with
the SSL being incompressible (and modems compressing =96 though the stats
don=92t indicate any compression coming in [3%]).

The other problem is to do with modem speed determination.  Our site
(about to go to beta) is a streaming site and I have to find out what
the real connection speed is (to provide the best quality sound for the
connection).  I do this by the test page having a js check the time,
loading 20k of random chars and a js checking the time.

This works fine in HTTP, but under HTTPS the same page shown
dramatically SHORTER times between the start and the end.  I theorise
that IE is decrypting the SSL stream in large gulps and feeding the
gulps to the browser so we are decoupled from the real download.

Any one any ideas on either of these issues?

Iain Downs