SQLCipher Performance and SQLCipherSpeed
Recently, we had a query on the the SQLCipher Users’ mailing list inquiring about the performance of a LIKE query, where the user was wondering if SQLCipher’s encryption engine was responsible for poor performance he was seeing in his code. “It depends,” is the cheapest and most accurate answer we could give without seeing his query and the EXPLAIN plan generated by SQLite (no index, for instance, could lead to a full table scan, thus requiring every page to be decrypted). What we do know is that performance of SQLCipher compared to SQLite is really pretty good, and certainly good enough for our needs as application developers.
If you’ve been wondering what kind of performance hit you can expect using SQLCipher as compared to vanilla-SQLite, we’ve published a new tool to help you get an idea. In the end, EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN cannot be replaced, but for a quick side-by-side reference to see that we’ve done a half-decent job, check out Stephen’s SQLCipherSpeed. It’s an iPhone OS project that rips through the various SQLite speed tests. I ran it on my crunky iPhone 3G and the results were about what I expected, and pretty interesting:
In this next one, note that there is no performance impact for 2500 selects on an index.
You’re highly encourage to check out the code yourself, and to fork it. It would be really cool if someone added an action button to the results screen to email the data off-device. More tests wouldn’t hurt either.
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