SSL uses more CPU yes.  Encryption is somewhat processor intensive.

--
jeremiah();

I think that's /way/ too high.  I've just tried a couple of sftp clients from a
Windows box to a Linux VMWare host (over Windows) on my LAN, and while the CPU
load on the client box was quite high (around 60%), the load on the server was
too low to put a number on it -- barely detectable.

The clients I used were sftp from the Cygwin distribution, and psftp from
PuTTY.  The sftp server is whatever comes in the box with SuSE 8.2.  The client
is a 1.5 GHz machine, the server is 2.5 GHz -- both Intel.

Perhaps your client/server were negotiating a particularly expensive encryption
algorithm, or compression algorithm.  You can watch the negotiation with
Ethereal, but I don't know SSL well enough to judge what was going on between
my machines, let alone suggest what might be going wrong between yours.

   -- chris