GPG Bench Cipher

After reading depesz’s great speeding-up-dumprestore-process blog post. I started thinking about how to securely transfer a file from one server to another in the fastest possible way. The problem being that scp/sftp is slow for various reasons. ftp, http, nc, cifs, rsync are all plain text so can be quickly discounted. I don’t know if ssltunnel suffers from the same window limitations that ssh suffers from. I guess using a dedicated vpn would do the trick. However I liked the idea of using gpg. I was not sure which cipher to use so I decided to run a few benchmarks to see. The results are on my site. Once the encrypted file has been created then it can be transfered using any of the available plain text mechanisms. I think nc or ftp have the least overhead.