Just for fun, I ran some experiments comparing performance of CloudFS
vs. ecryptfs/encfs on top of "vanilla" GlusterFS. Take these with a
grain of salt, since these are very quick tests with only a single
server on my 1GbE test systems. This is using the current AES code
without read-modify-write, and unoptimized binaries (because I use those
for debugging and I couldn't be bothered rebuilding etc. just for this).
(MB/s) write rewrite read
CloudFS 21.4 38.3 46.0
ecryptfs 5.1 18.2 89.9
encfs 2.3 2.3 81.2
The abysmal performance of ecryptfs/encfs for writes was expected, due
to context switches and copies between themselves and GlusterFS. Their
good performance on reads was much more of a surprise. It looks like it
might be worth investigating the read-performance issue in CloudFS.
Also, this gives us an approximate idea of how much performance
"headroom" we have as we make the CloudFS encryption more secure.