GPG Bench Cipher

I benchmarked a few of the gpg ciphers. I created a 1GB file from /dev/urandom with dd. Running “gpg –version” gives a list of available ciphers. I then ran “time cat test | gpg –symmetric –cipher-algo TWOFISH > test.enc” for each cipher to see how fast they all were. It’s not amazingly accurate but it gave a good indication which one to avoid! I ran this on my “Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13GHz”, 2.6.30 gives this 4256 bogomips for what its worth. Anyway, on with the results.

I also ran a new file of the same size but just zeros. The results were all more or less the same, I’m not sure why the times are so much sorter, I guess all the algorithms are good at optimizing zeros. Also dd takes about 15 seconds to write a 1G file “time echo $(dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1024 of=test; sync)”, this equates to about 70MB/s write speed which sounds in the right ball park.

So don’t use 3DES, otherwise they are all pretty much the same. To improve it more I should probably make an effort to the idle the cpu and make the file a lot bigger or store the file in ram, but I can’t be bothered.