Google Speeds up the web with SPDY

Google created a new internet protocol to speed up web page loading over HTTP, called SPDY (speedy). It is  already in use in Chrome if you go to a google website as a toggle option. According to the author of this article it sped things up by about 20% and the benchmarking tool they provide backed up what he had seen himself showing a 15% increase in performance.
      Google started working on this in November 2009, and currently it only works if both the browser and the website server both use SPDY. Currently only chrome and google sites and services use it but
Google plans on open-sourcing SPDY and the C++ code is available today. There’s also an experimental SPDY Apache Web server module and Ruby code if you want to tinker with it yourself on the server side.
      SPDY also won’t work equally well on all kinds of data. According to a note in the SPDY developers’ mailing list, “SPDY requires that the client support gzip compression [a data compression program] of payloads. The hope is that gzip quickly, simply and automatically gets pretty good compression of the payload.”
      That means that since it compresses the data , transfers of data that is already compressed will not see much of an improvement, but you should still see some improvement because SPDY compresses the HTTP header, and  more importantly, according to the second draft of the SPDY specification, SPDY “adds a framing layer for multiplexing multiple, concurrent streams across a single TCP connection (or any reliable transport stream). The framing layer is optimized for HTTP-like request-response streams.” Under SPDY, there is no limit to the number of requests that can be issued concurrently over a single SPDY connection. Because requests are interleaved on a single channel, the protocol is more efficient over TCP.
     Also something I found neat is with SPDY, a Web browser can also prioritize requests. This way you can get the most critical data first, say a video stream, rather than wasting waiting around for an ad to appear before starting the video.


Overall this seems promising and like the author of this article says: "I hope that Google will soon officially open the source and submit SPDY to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to make it an official standard."



http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/google-speeds-up-the-web-with-spdy/930