Native PGP should perform at least comparatively with Command Line versions of PGP when encrypting large files

Recent versions of B2Bi have included a version of PGP (Native PGP) built into the product which allows users to perform PGP operations within B2Bi rather than having to use the CLA2 adapter to call these operations. This on paper provides many benefits to the user which are well documented.

However - internal testing within our own organisation has shown that when compared to command line versions of PGP encryption software, encryption operations on larger files (our testing was done with ~1GB files) using Native PGP can take 3-4 times as long. None of the settings recommended to us by IBM have been able to significantly improve this, and IBM's own lab testing performed off the back of a support case raised shows that the issue is not environment specific.

Our internal testing has shown improvement in the time it takes Native PGP to perform decrypt operations when compared with command line PGP - and in the time it takes to encrypt a large amount of small files concurrently - but the encryption performance with large files is stopping us from proceeding with a planned migration to Native PGP from our command line based PGP software.

The indication from Support is that this is happening due to Native PGP sharing the same JVM as B2Bi - whereas external PGP will use resources outside of the B2Bi JVM.

Regardless of the cause - there would be more appetite from customers to make the move to Native PGP if it at least performed comparatively (in terms of the time it takes to complete operations) to command line versions of PGP when it comes to encrypting large files. A large file that takes 1 hour to encrypt with command line PGP taking 3-4 hours to encrypt with Native PGP would definitely be noticeable by the receiving partner.