Use of OpenSSL command looks slow

[maxpeterson]

We have been using SimpleAES and I noticed it was using a process to run OpenSSL to do the encryption. We noticed the encryption seeming slow so I created a quick benchmark to see how the speed of this compares to using pycrypto.

The results of the benchmark against the latest version of SimpleAES does not look good:

name	rank	runs	mean	sd	timesBaseline
pycrypto aes	1	10	0.02799	0.004236	1.0
pycrypto blowfish	2	10	0.1362	0.01185	4.86693156086
simpleaes	3	10	6.488	0.228	231.818900462

Each of the above 30 runs were run in random, non-consecutive order by
benchmark v0.1.5 (http://jspi.es/benchmark) with Python 2.7.2
Darwin-12.3.0-x86_64 on 2013-05-29 09:47:26.

Running the same benchmark against SimpleAES==0.1 looks much better:

name	rank	runs	mean	sd	timesBaseline
pycrypto aes	1	10	0.02647	0.0002615	1.0
simpleaes	2	10	0.08313	0.001742	3.14058289017
pycrypto blowfish	3	10	0.1234	0.001254	4.66106763515

Each of the above 30 runs were run in random, non-consecutive order by
benchmark v0.1.5 (http://jspi.es/benchmark) with Python 2.7.2
Darwin-12.3.0-x86_64 on 2013-05-29 09:45:26.

My suspicion is that it is not OpenSSL that is slow but the overhead of starting a new sub process to run OpenSSL is slower