Security vs. Speed

I was hoping someone would be able to clarify whether or not it is possible to use an SSL certification and an accelerator for PHP?

It would be great to have both, but I came across an article the other day that said that an SSL  request would not be cached. I was hoping that only pertained to financial transactions and other transfer of sensitive info, but it sounds like any page that begins with "https"? 

Have any of you used both successfully?

I am not aware of any problem with using both, its not even make sense to me to compare both.

I'm sorry, I guess I wasn't clear.

I wasn't comparing them to each other as they serve two different functions.

From what I read the other day, the two different programs can't be used at the same time because, according to the stated article, SSL requests would not be cached by the accelerator. In effect, rendering it useless.

What I needed clarification on was if that does indeed pertain to every secure page, or if the accelerator could be set to ignore only certain SSL calls (e.g. financial transactions) while caching others.

 first of, what accelerator are you talking about? eAccelerator has been dropped as of 7.1.2.

And,

using https or http should not matter on site speed at all.

I would like a link to that article because i believe it is false. php accelerators cache php to make it run faster. It's not caching generated pages. I believe there is some confusion between php accelerators, proxy servers and web browser caching.

There is a slight performance hit for https due to the compression. Small requests take more time than log requests due to the handshaking process ssl must go through, so yea, depending on the content of the site, it may indeed run slower. There is plenty of google hits on https performance.

Sorry, it took me a bit to find that reference. 

"Minimize use of SSL — because encrypted pages are not stored by shared caches, use them only when you have to, and use images on SSL pages sparingly."

- http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/

Yea. I believe that refers to caching the output. Mostly proxy servers which cache pages and are shared caches. A php accelerator is different.

I see no reason why both can't be used.

Great! Thanks!