Why do most SSL pages load so slowly or are constantly busy, even when regular pages are fast?

SSL pages have to go through tons of encryption and decryption when transferring data to ensure security and integrity of information. Probably because of this, SSL pages tends to be slower.

yes correct - takes some extra CPU work :)

Greetings:

The respondents to date are correct. SSL gets encrypted both ways.

However, if it really matters there are products that can speed up SSL transacations (need to be on a co-located or dedicated server though).

Thanks, all. That explains the slowness, but why are many Secure Pages constantly busy? Are Secure Pages on a separate server because I cannot find a Secure directory in CPanel?

Originally posted by chrisb
Thanks, all. That explains the slowness, but why are many Secure Pages constantly busy? Are Secure Pages on a separate server because I cannot find a Secure directory in CPanel?

That's because a Secure directory doesn't exist in CPanel

The data on the server is not encryted. It is the traffic between you and the SSL server which is.

Pages on a SSL site are passed to you through an encrypted channel, which takes up more CPU time on both the remote server and the local computer, which turns the page to appear a little slower to load. Also, encrypted data can't be compressed like most of the pages are on most home connection protocols. The reason is that the basic of compression is to remove redundancy in data and replace the second (and third and fourth etc) instance of the same string by a pointer to the first one. Once encrypted, the data contain no more redundancy (if the same string is found 5 times in the data, they will all be encrypted in a different way). On slow connections (56kbps for example) the pages may take 3 times or more the time it takes for a regular page to download.