SSL tuning

Now, another important piece of tuning the traffic is tuning how NetScaler should handle encrypted traffic. However, one important aspect to think about is that the higher the encryption levels go, the slower the throughput gets.

This means the best performance does not always give the best performance; therefore, it is always important to think what is the necessary level of security before starting to tune SSL.

Nevertheless, we will be discussing some of the SSL features that can be tuned.

On NetScaler, we have something called SSL profiles that allow us to define how SSL traffic should be handled. These profiles can then be bound to a vServer or Service depending on the requirements. Now, unlike TCP profiles, we need to define whether an SSL profile should be frontend or backend, as shown in the following screenshot:

This is because NetScaler has different capabilities, depending on whether the communication is public facing or whether it is going to a backend server.

The SSL profiles...