Question : How to reduce the SSL overhead without the SSL Accelerator

I'm developing a B2B Java application which interact with other web application using the https. Our application will send a request message to the other web application (support http keep alive)when our customer perform any transaction in our system. So, a new SSL handshaking session will be established when there is any new transaction coming in to our system. This cause a lot of overhead to our system when there are a lot of handshaking session going to establish. I know we can offload the SSL processing by using the SSL accelerator hardware. However, we have budgetting issue to acquire this hardware. So, would like to know is there any way to minimise the SSL handshaking by reuse the https session or offload the SSL handshaking processing. As i know, we can make use the http server keepalive parameter to cache the SSL session. Is this a good way to handle this issue?

Answer : How to reduce the SSL overhead without the SSL Accelerator

This will not help you. The CPU overhead is as a result of performing the RSA private key decryption.
which is done at the beginning of the session- after that the session key is encrypted with a (much faster) symmetric key. If you are on a shoestring budget then consider a 2nd-hand one from ebay, but make sure it has the right APIs to allow you to interface with it.