Performance Impact of ZFS Encryption on Oracle Solaris

Transparent Encryption is very easy to use on Oracle Solaris.
You just need to set the encryption property when you create a new filesystem and provide a passphrase or keyfile.

On a SPARC S7 LDom we have 3 ZFS filesystems with different encryption settings.

# zfs get encryption v0123_db/plain v0123_db/encr v0123_db/encr256
NAME              PROPERTY    VALUE        SOURCE
v0123_db/encr     encryption  on           local
v0123_db/encr256  encryption  aes-256-ccm  local
v0123_db/plain    encryption  off          -
Now lets see how much is the difference in write performance if we copy a 1 GB file.

# ls -lh p25604852_1100_Solaris86-64_1of4.zip
-rw-r--r--   1 marcel   staff       1.3G Apr  7  2017 p25604852_1100_Solaris86-64_1of4.zip
#

# time cp p25604852_1100_Solaris86-64_1of4.zip /plain

real    0m8.829s
user    0m0.002s
sys     0m1.711s

# time cp p25604852_1100_Solaris86-64_1of4.zip /encr

real    0m9.229s
user    0m0.002s
sys     0m1.747s

# time cp p25604852_1100_Solaris86-64_1of4.zip /encr256

real    0m9.733s
user    0m0.002s
sys     0m1.754s

The difference is a low one digit percent value.

Performance impact is a little larger when doing a simple read test.

# time cp /plain/p25604852_1100_Solaris86-64_1of4.zip /tmp

real    0m4.216s
user    0m0.002s
sys     0m3.810s

# time cp /encr/p25604852_1100_Solaris86-64_1of4.zip /tmp

real    0m5.131s
user    0m0.003s
sys     0m5.028s

# time cp /encr256/p25604852_1100_Solaris86-64_1of4.zip /tmp

real    0m5.400s
user    0m0.003s
sys     0m5.287s

Learn more about ZFS encryption with the Oracle Solaris 11.4 ZFS Admin Guide

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37838_01/html/E61017/gkkih.html