Which data encryption mechanism to use for data transfer? I have high performance nodes communicating with each other sending logs and data over network.
The communication is heavy and over public network.

I would like to know how to know which is the best encryption algorithm to be used to encrypt and decrypt the data so that it has minimal affect over performance simultaneous making the encrypted data unbreakable and secure?

Currently according to my survey i have considered 2 Algorithms to be best i.e. 

TwoFish - Have heard that this is the fastest
AES 128 - Have heard that this is the most efficient
AES 256 - HAve heard that this is the most secure
Any other algorithm would also do fine



  Security and performance overload of the system is to be kept in mind
You should use AES. If you have the AES-NI instruction (which most modern chips have), then this performs very fast. For most applications today, AES-128 is certainly sufficient. However, I want to stress that it's not just the algorithm, it's also the mode of operation. You should use GCM. If you use OpenSSL then with AES-128-GCM you'll get speeds of about 0.7 cycles per byte for encryption (with AES-NI).