The Cost Of Home Directory Encryption & LUKS Full Disk Encryption On Ubuntu 18.04

Should you find yourself running PostgreSQL on your system if for example you are using it when prototyping/developing, full disk encryption performance did over much better performance than home directory encryption.

Here the CPU usage was similar between the different disk setups.

Lastly is a look at the overall CPU usage over the course of all the benchmarks carried out. When using eCryptfs-based home encryption the average CPU usage was just about 1% higher than no encryption on this Broadwell laptop with SATA solid-state storage. Using full disk encryption meanwhile had on average 4% higher CPU usage than without encryption.

While full disk encryption consumes more CPU cycles than the home directory encryption, as shown by these test results, the performance tends to be significantly better than with home directory encryption.