[gnutls-help] GnuTLS performance on slower devices

[Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos]

On Tue, 2019-03-05 at 18:39 +0000, Shawn Hall wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> One of our customers uses TigerVNC for graphical connections to
> systems.  There are more details here 
> https://github.com/TigerVNC/tigervnc/issues/737, but we’ve found that
> on slower devices such as the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 that there was
> a noticeable slowdown when encryption is enabled.  In talking to the
> TigerVNC developers, we’ve found that this slowdown is due to some
> fundamental parts of GnuTLS such a memory allocation and buffer
> management.
>  
> Is there any work in progress or planned that would improve GnuTLS
> performance on slower devices?

I was never aware of any such problem with memory allocation and buffer
management on slower devices. What I believe is more likely is that
crypto in nettle library is not optimized for these platforms. There
are certain improvements discussed on the nettle for specific platforms
on its mailing list.

regards,
Nikos