A bag of tricks to super-charge OpenSSL

There are any number of ways to improve the performance of SSL, ranging in difficulty from a simple config change to installing dedicated hardware or desperately trying to get the protocol modified.                               
                                                                                                                      
This article focuses on accelerating the performance of SSL by improving OpenSSL's hash, block and key algorithm performance. By increasing the data which you can transmit and the number of SSL handshakes that can be performed, you can reduce the overhead of SSL on your current server hardware. Beyond configuration and implementation improvements, I will also present two additional solutions: adding an SSL accelerator card and modifying OpenSSL to utilize Intel's IPP library.