Encrypting data at rest is a modern requirement that occurs all the time. The go-to method that most admins think of is to use GPG. But it’s slow. How slow? Lets find out. First, I generated a 1GB file of random data: dd if=/dev/urandom of=data.file bs=1MB count=1024 Then I timed its encryption with GPG: gpg --encrypt --compress-level 0 --sign --armor -r me@example.com data.file Time: 0m13.285s The --compress-level 0 disables compression as there is no compression used by OpenSSL.
