UserPageChonhulio

Block read/write, 1MB block size, 1GB total, 2GHz Athlon, 40 GB WDC WD400EB-00CPF0

read	read	write	write
plain		plain
total 26.96		total 33.89
sys 3.046		sys 2.623
37.98 MB/s		30.21 MB/s
AES-i586-128	AES-i586-256	AES-i586-128	AES-i586-256
total 40.96	total 43.40	total 35.15	total 35.65
sys 3.36	sys 3.20	sys 25.21	sys 11.37
25.00 MB/s	23.59 MB/s	29.13 MB/s	28.72 MB/s
Serpent-128	Serpent-256	Serpent-128	Serpent-256
total 47.81	total 47.69	total 40.79	total 40.93
sys 3.37	sys 3.23	sys 6.35	sys 6.18
21.41 MB/s	21.47 MB/s	25.10 MB/s	25.01 MB/s
Twofish-128	Twofish-256	Twofish-128	Twofish-256
total 47.70	total 47.82	total 42.81	total 42.90
sys 3.48	sys 3.37	sys 12.62	sys 12.86
21.46 MB/s	21.41 MB/s	23.91 MB/s	23.86 MB/s
Blowfish-128	Blowfish-256	Blowfish-128	Blowfish-256
total 53.02	total 53.18	total 50.69	total 50.65
sys 3.43	sys 3.38	sys 14.91	sys 14.91
19.31 MB/s	19.26 MB/s	20.20 MB/s	20.21 MB/s
AES-128	AES-256	AES-128	AES-256
total 50.57	total 59.10	total 46.49	total 52.61
sys 3.28	sys 3.26	sys 13.99	sys 15.46
20.24 MB/s	17.32 MB/s	22.02 MB/s	19.46 MB/s
DES-64	3-DES-192	DES-64	3-DES-192
total 64.65	total 125.62	total 68.24	total 125.48
sys 3.32	sys 3.53	sys 18.91	sys 34.11
15.84 MB/s	8.15 MB/s	15.00 MB/s	8.16 MB/s

Conclusions:
- The speed of Twofish, Blowfish and Serpent is not affected by keysize
- DES and Triple-DES are completely outdated
- DES is not secure, keys are simply too short
- Assembler-optimized code (AES-i586) really makes a difference

In recent versions of Linux (2.6.8 or newer) AES-i586 has been included.
When compiling for an x86-CPU >=i586 it will be used instead of the default implementation.

Further readings on ciphers:
Twofish
Blowfish
Serpent
AES
(Triple-)DES

The performance of encryption algorithms is greatly affected by hardware details. PowerPCs, SPARCs and even different x86-CPUs will give different results.