Re: [LAU] encryption and performance penalty

On 11/13/2014 02:31 AM, Atte wrote: LUKS, dm-crypt, and the Debian installer make partition-based drive encryption easy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dm-crypt Intel added AES-NI to their CPU's a few years ago, which helps with encrypted drive performance (and is supported by Wheezy): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set STFW for benchmarks, I've seen anywhere from 2x to 10x improvement in encrypted disk performance without AES-NI vs. with AES-NI. It's hard to isolate -- there are many other significant factors in real systems doing real work. My subjective experience with SOHO desktops and servers with respect to drives is that going from HDD to SSD has the most dramatic impact on performance. dm-crypt encryption causes a noticeable slow-down on older machines without AES-NI when launching applications or doing bulk transfers (half speed?), but it's not a deal-breaker. My Core i7-2600S system with AES-NI, 8 GB RAM, and encrypted SSD is so much quicker than everything else that I don't notice. I've done some light music work on both kinds of machines, and haven't encountered any problems due to encrypted drive performance. I suggest that you get yourself a newer SSD and give it a try. :-) HTH, David p.s. The old-fashioned trick of increasing RAM to improve performance is just as valid today as it ever was. How much RAM do you have in your machine, what is it's capacity, and how much RAM and swap are in use when you are doing your heaviest music work?