Perf Issue with passing CA certs in Agent Options for HTTPS calls vs NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS

[mdathrika]

Version

18.x

Platform

Ubuntu, Mac

Subsystem

No response

What steps will reproduce the bug?

addCACert() has bottleneck when HTTPS endpoint is called with https.agent.ca option using https, when we switch to using NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS environment variable, we do not see addCACert() bottleneck.

With agent.ca options pointing to CA certs

const https = require('https');
const fs = require('fs');

// Read the CA certificate file (replace 'ca.pem' with your actual CA certificate file path)
const caCert = fs.readFileSync('ca.pem');

// Create an agent with the CA certificate
const agent = new https.Agent({
  ca: caCert
});

function callHttpsService(url) {
    https.get(url, { agent: agent }, (res) => {
        let data = '';

        // A chunk of data has been received.
        res.on('data', (chunk) => {
            data += chunk;
        });

        // The whole response has been received. Print out the result.
        res.on('end', () => {
            console.log(data);
        });

    }).on("error", (err) => {
        console.log("Error: " + err.message);
    });
}

callHttpsService('https://example.com');

With NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS env variable pointing to CA certs

export NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS=/path/to/cert.pem && node index.js

// index.js
const https = require('https');

function callHttpsService(url) {
    https.get(url, { agent: agent }, (res) => {
        let data = '';

        // A chunk of data has been received.
        res.on('data', (chunk) => {
            data += chunk;
        });

        // The whole response has been received. Print out the result.
        res.on('end', () => {
            console.log(data);
        });

    }).on("error", (err) => {
        console.log("Error: " + err.message);
    });
}

callHttpsService('https://example.com');

How often does it reproduce? Is there a required condition?

This is introduced in Node 16.x and seen in Node 18.x & Node 20.x. For every request.

What is the expected behavior? Why is that the expected behavior?

What do you see instead?

Additional information

No response