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)