High load on web servers during holiday season

Take Paypal for instance...

[sun818]

A lot of eBay sellers are posting on various auction forums that Paypal is responding very slowly lately. This got me thinking about http web servers vs web servers that utilize https. They must be handling a lot of traffic due to holiday shopping and finances.

Do any of you manage public secure servers?

Is there significant CPU load difference between http and https?

Are there ways to reduce the server load either hardware or software?

[bcc1234]

I have a few sites where I accept credit cards on the site as opposed to sending the visitors to the processor's site.
OpenSSL does require some CPU resources, but if you don't secure ridiculous places like shopping cart then the number of requests over https would be small compared to the overal site load.

Besides, if your https traffic is so high - you must be a rich man and should be able to afford a dedicated box for SSL processing :)

I, for one, would not be complaining if my "Give us your money" page were overloaded with requests :)

[veritysystems]

If it's any consultion Overture's https secure pages (i.e. all of the bidding system) have been very slow today.