The last few releases have been consistently improving the performance of the public key algorithms. Since 1.5.2, Botan has gained full x86 and amd64 assembler backends (contributed by Luca Piccarreta), a much faster (and more predictable) bitmap-based memory allocator, and a large number of minor optimizations througout BigInt's core algorithms, particularly with the aim of reducing the amount of memory allocation/deallocation that is needed.
Botan 1.5.5, releaesd today, fixes a potential infinite loop in the memory allocators introduced in 1.5.4 (found and fixed independently by Jack Lloyd and Matt Johnston; Matt's fix turned out to be a bit cleaner). Temporary workspace memory used by the Karatsuba algorithm is now cached across multiple multiplications if possible. Also the addition and subtraction operators were cleaned up, reducing the number of temporary memory allocations needed. Benchmarks show 1.5.5 is the fastest version of Botan so far, and is actually benchmarking quite competitively with OpenSSL on an Opteron system.
Posted 2006/02/05 in releases; no comments
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