<p>We are looking to do some heavy security requirements on our project, and we need to do a lot of encryption that is highly performant.</p>

<p>I think that I know that PKI is much slower and more complex than symmetric encryption, but I can't find the numbers to back up my feelings.</p>

Use the OpenSSL
```
speed
```
subcommand to benchmark the algorithms and see for yourself.
```
```
[dave@hal9000 ~]$ openssl speed aes-128-cbc
Doing aes-128 cbc for 3s on 16 size blocks: 26126940 aes-128 cbc's in 3.00s
Doing aes-128 cbc for 3s on 64 size blocks: 7160075 aes-128 cbc's in 3.00s
...
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
aes-128 cbc     139343.68k   152748.27k   155215.70k   155745.61k   157196.29k

[dave@hal9000 ~]$ openssl speed rsa2048
Doing 2048 bit private rsa's for 10s: 9267 2048 bit private RSA's in 9.99s
Doing 2048 bit public rsa's for 10s: 299665 2048 bit public RSA's in 9.99s
...
                  sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
rsa 2048 bits 0.001078s 0.000033s    927.6  29996.5
```
```