openssl speed -elapsed aes-256-cbc [R1 J0 L:0.46 0.41 0.69 U:22+17:12 pts/13 3719H] You have chosen to measure elapsed time instead of user CPU time. Doing aes-256 cbc for 3s on 16 size blocks: 10229451 aes-256 cbc's in 3.00s Doing aes-256 cbc for 3s on 64 size blocks: 3689031 aes-256 cbc's in 3.00s Doing aes-256 cbc for 3s on 256 size blocks: 928701 aes-256 cbc's in 3.00s Doing aes-256 cbc for 3s on 1024 size blocks: 205258 aes-256 cbc's in 3.00s Doing aes-256 cbc for 3s on 8192 size blocks: 29274 aes-256 cbc's in 3.00s OpenSSL 1.0.1t 3 May 2016 built on: Thu Jan 26 23:29:15 2017 options:bn(64,64) rc4(16x,int) des(idx,cisc,16,int) aes(partial) blowfish(idx) compiler: gcc -I. -I.. -I../include -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -m64 -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -g -O2 -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wl,-z,relro -Wa,--noexecstack -Wall -DMD32_REG_T=int -DOPENSSL_IA32_SSE2 -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT5 -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_GF2m -DSHA1_ASM -DSHA256_ASM -DSHA512_ASM -DMD5_ASM -DAES_ASM -DVPAES_ASM -DBSAES_ASM -DWHIRLPOOL_ASM -DGHASH_ASM The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed. type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-256 cbc 54557.07k 78699.33k 79249.15k 70061.40k 79937.54k