Performance improvement proposal

[Paolo De Santis]

Hello,

After upgrading from openssl 1.x to 3.x, I've seen significant performance
degradation in a particular scenario where wget was used to perform
multiple HEAD requests, targeting a server with a self-signed certificate,
thus using the option "--check-certificate=quiet". That led me to dig a bit
deeper and find an open issue
<https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/18814>, regarding the speed of
"SSL_CTX_load_verify_locations" in openssl 3.x. As a workaround, when the
user requests that the certificate is not checked at all, I'd propose to
skip CA certificates loading, thus avoiding unnecessary function calls
(proposed implementation in "skip-ca-loading.patch").

In addition, when the user sets the quiet flag "-q" and, at the same time,
uses the option "--no-check-certificate", I believe the program should
behave as if the user had set "--check-certificate=quiet", because the
warning would not be printed anyways (proposed implementation in
"quiet-cert-check.patch").

Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss further about these possible
changes.

Thanks for your work! Have a great day!

-- 
Paolo De Santis

skip-ca-loading.patch
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quiet-cert-check.patch
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