[stunnel-users] stunnel high load and lower network I/O yields

Tue May 10 12:07:31 CEST 2011

jay at experts-exchange.com wrote:
> We are finding a bottleneck with stunnel for video intensive apps where
it
> will run with weighted CPU near 120% and network interface will yield
> 30.3Mb, whereas without stunnel the rates will top off near 53.1Mb
during
> the 10 second intervals as reported by iftop. The peaks are higher, but
> this is not sustained for either case. In order to improve stunnel's
> performance, is it possible to use a less intensive compute processing
> encryption,

Add the following options to stunnel.conf:
  libwrap = no
  ciphers = RC4-MD5

> or fork the stunnel per connection?

Stunnel does create separate CPU threads for individual connections,
unless compiled with UCONTEXT threading mode:
  ./configure --with-threads=ucontext

BTW: I guess the traffic limit at 30.3Mb/s is not a result of slow
symmetric encryption, unless your machine is a WRT router.  There must be
another issue.
http://www.stunnel.org/?page=perf
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bit_rate
How many new connections per second does your stunnel accept (check your
log files)?  Also send a sample (10KB) of your stunnel debug logs for us to
review.

Mike