Originally raised by Ben Bangert on the python-dev mailing list.

It turns out that OpenSSL has a mode setting, SSL_MODE_RELEASE_BUFFERS, that can be set by a call to SSK_CTX_set_mode. This mode can potentially reduce connection overhead by nearly 18kB *per connection*, a reduction of something like 60%. Further, this does not change the behaviour of OpenSSL in any meaningful way.

For this reason, we should unconditionally set this mode on all SSL Context objects we create.

I'm happy to submit a patch to the standard library that will do this.