Wasn’t the server load for ssl something like 3-5%? That doesn’t strike me as much of a factor as the complexity involved, especially with the confusion added by eg Thawte hawking their enhanced validation product.
"On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load" according to Google back in January 2010 [1]. This was about the same time as Intel introduced AES instructions, but the post suggests that this wasn't a big factor in their conclusion that TLS simply isn't computationally expensive.
> Wasn’t the server load for ssl something like 3-5%?
Depends on the packets per second being handled. I’ve pegged a CPU core easily doing encryption just a bit over a decade ago due to high data rate. If you’re pushing >500Mb/sec without CPU accelerated encryption (or NIC offloading) it puts a pretty hefty strain on resources.
