I have an Amazon Web Services setup with an Apache instance behind Nginx with Nginx handling SSL and serving everything but the .php pages. In my ApacheBench tests I'm seeing this for my most expensive API call (which cache via Memcached):

100 concurrent calls to API call (http): 115ms (median) 260ms (max)
100 concurrent calls to API call (https): 6.1s (median) 11.9s (max)

I've done a bit of research, disabled the most expensive SSL ciphers and enabled SSL caching (I know it doesn't help in this particular test.) Can you tell me why my SSL is taking so long? I've set up a massive EC2 server with 8CPUs and even applying consistent load to it only brings it up to 50% total CPU. I have 8 Nginx workers set and a bunch of Apache. Currently this whole setup is on one EC2 box but I plan to split it up and load balance it. There have been a few questions on this topic but none of those answers (disable expensive ciphers, cache ssl, seem to do anything.) Sample results below:

$ ab -k -n 100 -c 100 https://URL 
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking URL.com (be patient).....done


Server Software:        nginx/1.0.15
Server Hostname:        URL.com
Server Port:            443
SSL/TLS Protocol:       TLSv1/SSLv3,AES256-SHA,2048,256

Document Path:          /PATH
Document Length:        73142 bytes

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   12.204 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Keep-Alive requests:    0
Total transferred:      7351097 bytes
HTML transferred:       7314200 bytes
Requests per second:    8.19 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       12203.589 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       122.036 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          588.25 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       65  168  64.1    162     268
Processing:   385 6096 3438.6   6199   11928
Waiting:      379 6091 3438.5   6194   11923
Total:        449 6264 3476.4   6323   12196

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%   6323
  66%   8244
  75%   9321
  80%   9919
  90%  11119
  95%  11720
  98%  12076
  99%  12196
 100%  12196 (longest request)