I have setup an AWS infrastructure such that there is servers sitting behind application load balancer. there are 2 listener one fro port 80 and other for port 443, route 53 ssl everything else has been setup such that the URL is configured to the ALB. The listener at port 80 is set to redirect the request to port 443/HTTPS. Even after this the Apache bench testing gives a higher latency when requesting a direct HTTPS request as compared to HTTP request.
I tried replicating this for amazon.com and the issue is valid there as well, but the difference over there is that the http request is responded by the CDN whereas the https request is being responded by the server.
P.S i am not using any CDN.
The issue was that ab does not follow through the request and calculates based on redirection. Hence, the issue. Also ab does not honour keep alive.