Ok, I was here until around 7pm last night, which was a terrible choice, because there are home games at Fenway all this week… It was hell trying to walk the block between work and the Kenmore station against the baseball sidewalk traffic… I came into work later today planning to leave some time after 7:30p.. Hopefully the commute will be a bit simpler then, but who knows…
NSPR is pretty interesting, even if I am only using a limited subset of its functionality. I am working on modifying a load test client for one of our server packages. Originally, the test client compressed the data using Zlib, then sent it out over an SSL client… This put a lot of strain on our servers, and to see if there would be a benefit in using one of the hardware SSL accelerators out there, we decided to remove SSL from the client/server. Unfortunately, SSL and Compression were tied together pretty tightly in the test client, so I am rewriting quite a bit. One of the cool things about the I/O part of NSPR is that it allows you to add layers to the sockets, so I am adding a compression layer, and later I will remove the compression from the old SSL layer. Then we will be able to add the 2 layers in any combination with any other layers we dream up in the process.
Just reading SSL, thought I have to admit that I am not sure what you are doing there ;), I thought I’d tell you to take a look at F5 Networks stuff. http://www.f5networks.com . They seem to be building very high powerful SSL accelerators and just released a press release stating that they will go as high as 10000 transactions per second within 9 months. Their load balancing stuff is already in high use with big companies.
Thought you’d might find it usefull. Otherwise, just forget. It’s expensive.