I have a netbook with Windows on the second partition and Xubuntu (/ and /home) on the third partition. I selected to encrypt my home folder during installation. The performance of the netbook is adequate for the small machine that it is, but I'm looking to improve performance. I could not find much information about the overhead (CPU or drive) associated with home partition encryption. I ran the following, writing to my home partition as well as the the mounted Windows partition:

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/dummy bs=512 count=10240

dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/Windows/dummy bs=512 count=10240

The first returned 2.4MB/s and the second returned 2.5MB/s. Can I therefore deduce that there is very little overhead to home folder encryption? I'm not sure if the different filesystems will make any difference (/ and /home are ext3).

Update 1

I don't know why I didn't use /tmp instead of the mounted Windows folder. Only /home is encrypted, so /tmp is unencrypted ext3. The results of the dd as above are astounding:

~: 2.4 MB/s

/tmp: 42.6 MB/s

Comments please? The reason I am asking this is that disk access on the netbook is noticeably slow.

Update 2

I timed each of the dd operations with time:

~:

real    0m2.217s  
user    0m0.028s  
sys     0m2.176s

/tmp:

real    0m0.152s  
user    0m0.012s  
sys     0m0.136s

See also: discussion on UbuntuForums.org and bug report

Edit: Output of mount:

/dev/sda3 on / type ext3 (rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro,user_xattr,commit=600)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
none on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
none on /var/run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
none on /var/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/USER/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=USER)

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