Comment by grg0

Negotiating TLS handshakes is one way. But I'd imagine the rest is largely IO-bound like you said.

It still puts into perspective what a big pile of dogshit consumer software has become that stuff like this comes as a surprise. Also, the last time I checked, Let's Encrypt also ran on a single system. As did the Diablo 2 server (I love reading about these anecdotes.)

For every incremental change in HW performance, there is an order-of-magnitude regression in SW performance.