[Zr40]

How did you measure this?

When measuring on one of my servers that exposes both HTTP and HTTPS, there doesn't appear to be any significant difference.

HTTP:

  % wrk http://hostname
  Running 10s test @ http://hostname
    2 threads and 10 connections
    Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
      Latency     5.11ms    5.42ms  62.85ms   96.08%
      Req/Sec     1.10k   224.03     1.31k    87.04%
    17703 requests in 10.01s, 6.89MB read
  Requests/sec:   1768.57
  Transfer/sec:    704.58KB

HTTPS:

  % wrk https://hostname
  Running 10s test @ https://hostname
    2 threads and 10 connections
    Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
      Latency     4.75ms    4.09ms  50.37ms   96.48%
      Req/Sec     1.10k   228.86     1.34k    79.35%
    17014 requests in 10.01s, 8.39MB read
  Requests/sec:   1700.32
  Transfer/sec:    858.38KB

[Ono-Sendai]

I tested it with some of my own code, 8 threads making requests to my server at localhost.

Does this program 'wrk' re-establish a connection for each request, or is it re-using them?

[Zr40]

wrk[1] does appear to reuse a connection for each request.

[1] https://github.com/wg/wrk

[hirsin]

Any idea how HTTPS manages to have a significantly higher throughput? At first blush this doesn't quite pass the sniff test - it looks like there's another factor in play here.

[Zr40]

That's probably because the response to this particular https URL is larger; http on this server simply redirects to https and is therefore a smaller response.

Not that this matters here; the top level comment measured requests per second, not bytes per second. If anything, the smaller response for http would give http an advantage in this comparison.