Score:0

How much time do commodity computers spend doing bulk data (en)(de)cryption on average?

pt flag
Him

With the proliferation of https, and one of the primary functions of my pc being browsing the intarwebs, it occurs to me that my cpu is spending a lot of cycles doing AES en and de cryption. For the "average" PC (i.e. not servers or supercomputers, which is an interesting but different question), about what percent of one's cpu cycles are spent doing bulk data encryption? How does this compare with other normal computer tasks (e.g. "displaying graphics")?

For the sake of keeping the conversation on-focus let's just define "average percent of cpu cycles" as "# of cycles spent on AES on all laptops on March 10 2022 / total # cpu cycles on all laptops on March 10 2022". This has a single well-defined value. Back-of-envelope calculations welcome.

kelalaka avatar
in flag
Go to a hypothetical giant computer shop ( that contains all pre-April 2022 laptops, even not existing yet), buy all possible configurations, set up a system then test and find the average. Now, finally, you can answer your question. Better install OpenSSL to your 2022 March laptop and test it with OpenSSL speed and see your speed...
Him avatar
pt flag
Him
@kelalaka not even this would really help, because the answer depends on sociological factors such as the amount of time ppl spend on facebook vs using excel...
poncho avatar
my flag
@kelalaka: and the percentage of time is spent in facebook actually downloading (as opposed to viewing the downloaded content...)
Score:2
cn flag

Not really an answer but would be hard to read as comments. Feel free to downvote.

Pretty much all personal (consumer) computers for the last decade have CPUs with special instructions for AES and often also GCM/GMAC, so when SSL/TLS/HTTPS uses those (and usually it does) the CPU load is minimized. However, such computers for the last two decades have almost never used CPU to display graphics (or video), but instead one or several GPU(s), so comparing 'CPU cycles' for these uses is meaningless. What does take CPU in modern web browsing is running megabytes upon megabytes of 'JavaScript' (much of it really ECMAscript, or sometimes WASM now) and 'responsive' (i.e. constantly moving to make it difficult to read or control) design.

As a first approximation, try downloading some large files, like Unix distros, to storage. Even if your network connection is fast enough for this to pin one or two cores, I bet you'll find the volume of data you can download (but not process) is at least 10 times what you can effectively handle from a website, meaning that encryption/decryption and authentication (which is also required but you didn't ask about) plus TCP/IP processing (much of which is often offloaded to the NIC now) plus filesystem is less than 10% of the total, and probably more like 1-3%. Unless you have antivirus or similar doing realtime scanning, in which case it may eat as much as everything else combined -- or not.

But note the things you identify as computers, like desktops, laptops, and tablets, are not really 'commodity'. The computers embedded in things like your car braking system, refrigerator, stove/oven, furnace/boiler and/or air conditioner, doorbell, lawn sprinkler, and dog collar are far more numerous and far cheaper, making them much more commodities than anything you can ever use to display a website.

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