Does creating and working with a encrpyed folder using “ecryptfs-utils” pose any extra pressure on the CPU?

Question

I was thinking about creating a folder which I only can access. I want to know if I create the private folder, does it going to degrade the cpu performance as it may result in heavy encrypting and decrypting ?!

Im on Ubuntu 11.10 32 Bit OS

Intel Core2Duo

4 GB RAM.

Answer 1

Nope ! It does not give much pressure as I only have instructed the system to encrypt and decrypt the "Private" folder under /home/username/Private

If you use ecryptfs to encrypt the whole "home" directory then you will notice a lot of disk read/write noise coming at startup. Im using ecryptfs only to encrypt/decrypt the "Private" directory so it means less stress over the CPU.

Answer 2

Ofcourse it puts a bit of extra pressure on your cpu. Decrypting and encrypting has to take place! That being said, I do not believe that you'll notice any significant performance dump.

If you encrypted everything, even system files (I do not know if the tool lest you!) maybe you would notice lower performance! But if fx. you encrypted your entire home folder i do not believe it would decrease overall performance.

Test it - you could always revert your changes if the task's are to cop consuming ;)

Answer 3

Using ecryptfs may cost some memory, but without measuring it I'm quite sure it's negligible in comparison to your 4GB. It shouldn't cost any CPU time, except when using the encrypted folder (and maybe when logging in, but I don't think it's measurable).

You can find out the encryption speed e.g. by using Truecrypt (or OpenSSL or whatever). On a 4-core CPU supporting AES-NI it's possible to encrypt 3 GB/s, which is far more than the disk can provide. Without knowing much about your CPU I'd guess it can encrypt about 150 MB/s, which might be a problem for a disk-intensive application if everything was encrypted. Encrypting one folder should be fine, anyway.