I assume your point is about the first sentence of the article "This library was born out of a need to set up a secure channel over a TCP/IP network without the overhead of TLS.", but I interpreted this not in terms of performance, but in terms of lines of source code. OpenSSL in particular is pretty bloated [1].

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/openbsd-forks-prunes-fixes-open...