How It Works
The most computationally expensive part of an SSL session is the SSL handshake, where the SSL server (usually an SSL webserver) and the SSL client (usually a web browser) agree on a number of parameters that establish the security of the connection.
Part of the role of the SSL handshake is to agree on session keys (symmetric keys, used for the duration of a given session), but the encryption and signature of the SSL handshake messages itself is done using asymmetric keys (contained in the certificates), which requires more computational power than the symmetric cryptography used for the encryption/decryption of the session data.
Typically a hardware SSL accelerator will offload processing of the SSL handshake while leaving the server software to process the less intense symmetric cryptography of the actual SSL data exchange, but some accelerators handle all SSL operations and terminate the SSL connection, thus leaving the server seeing only unencrypted connections.
Because TLS is essentially an updated form of SSL, TLS session acceleration is essentially the same thing as SSL acceleration.
Read more about this topic: SSL Acceleration
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