Is the performance of Lion + SSD + Filevault2 good enough for a system primarily used for application developemnt? I'm looking to buy a MacBook Pro w/ SSD.

I was wondering if anyone out there has noticed any significant performance drop with FileVault2 enabled for the following tasks:


Small (under 2 GB) PostgreSQL and MySQL databases
Ruby development
Lots of grepping and text parsing
As you will buy one of the latest Macs, you should be fine.

The used Intel processors support Intel® Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) which is also used in Filevault 2.

Ars Technica, published an extended review on Filvault 2 in Lion. They say:


  Apple also leverages the special-purpose AES instructions and hardware on Intel's newest CPUs, further reducing the CPU overhead. The end result is that regular users will be hard-pressed to notice any reduction in performance with encryption enabled.


Edit:

These are real world numbers from my MBP with an Intel 2635QM processor which supports AES encryption. My hard drive is a Crucial M4 128GB.


Filevault 2 disabled: max. read 510MB/s, write: I forgot to write this down :(
Filevault 2 enabled: max. read 490MB/s, write: 190MB/s


I mention only the max. numbers as these figures depend on different factors for file operations. The difference for maximum read here is 20MB/s abosolutely which is 4% relatively.