The Cost Of Ubuntu Disk Encryption

When starting with Dbench, interestingly the full-disk encryption performance was much faster than using the eCryptfs-based home directory encryption. When encrypting the entire file-system, the full-disk encryption performance for Dbench was 84% the speed of an EXT4 file-system without any form of encryption while the home directory encryption was 44% the speed.

When it comes to the testing from the AMD FX-8350 Eight Core CPU with AES-NI, the CPU usage between the various forms of Linux disk encryption didn't lead to any major change.

Running PostgreSQL on the three different Ubuntu installs also showed the full disk encryption performing better than just encrypting the home directory atop EXT4.

During the first FS-Mark test, the full-disk encryption performance was 46% the speed of a file-system without encryption and 30% for home encryption.