I was just wondering if any developers have experienced a decrease in the performance/speed of their salesforce application when using SSL?

We've built a web-based application in java that allows our clients to submit some profile details to us which we store directly in a custom object in salesforce. We found that generally, the performance of the application was very poor. It took ages to establish the initial connection with salesforce (i.e. login via the salesforce api) and then the process of creating or update our custom object was very slow.

We've carried out a number of steps in an attempt to improve the speed and performance of the application including the following:

(1) We enabled SOAP compression

(2) We implemented a singleton for session management. We have a servlet deployed on our server that maintains a constant connection with salesforce. We update/refresh this connection every couple of hours. This gets rid of the initial delay we experience while trying to establish a connection/login to salesforce.

(3) We switched the MRU (Most recently used) functionality off.

These attempts did help increase the speed of the application and since then we have successfully deployed the application. However, we're now using SSL so our clients can feel more secure when using the application and submitting their details. Since using SSL, we've found that the speed of the application has deteriorated.

Has anyone else had any experience with this sort of thing? Anyone else been trying to enhance the speed and performance of their application? If so what did you try/were you successful? And for those of you using SSL, did you find a decrease in the performance of your application?

Thanks

Karen