Google’s SPDY initiative is about as enticing as a ‘free beer’ sign, and possibly as tempting. This may be an alternative/replacement for HTTP which could garner a net gain of…20% in page loading times! This is a big deal for those of us who don’t have a gigabit connection (yet).
In any case, this technology has been around for several years, but there is a new player involved (Strangeloop) which may be able to get this moving for us end users.
Add Google’s Alternative to HTTP to Your Website with Strangeloop Site Optimizer
http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/06/add-googles-alternative-to-htt.php
SPDY is a hypertext protocol developed by Google as an alternative/compliment to HTTP. It improves the performance of modern websites by adding a few features such as multiplexed requests, prioritized requests, and compressed headers. You can read our previous coverage for more information.
How can you take advantage of SPDY on your own site? So far, only Google Chrome (versions 6.0 and up) support SPDY, so you’ll need to support two protocols: SPDY for Chrome, and HTTP for everything else. You’ll also need to automatically switch between the two protocols depending on the browser your visitors are using.
Strangeloop Site Optimizer now does just that.
Strangeloop acts a reverse proxy, enabling site owners to setup SPDY without making any changes to their servers.
Strangeloop president Joshua Bixby says he thinks SPDY will make the biggest difference once mobile browsers begin taking advantage of it. Last week we took a look at Bixby’s research on response times on mobile browsers compared to desktop browsers. He says the move to SPDY will dramatically accelerate mobile browser performance. He also points out that SPDY improves the performance of SSL sessions.
Welcome to a Faster Web
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/37772/?mod=chfeatured
Website optimization company Strangeloop has built SPDY into its flagship product Site Optimizer, software that sits in between a website and its users, and adjusts the site’s code to make pages load more quickly. Strangeloop’s customers will have the ability to turn the protocol on easily; in tests, the protocol has sped up websites by 10 to 20 percent.
At first, this will only make a difference for people who visit websites using Google’s Chrome browser (the only one that supports SPDY), but Strangeloop expects that it could end up having a big impact on mobile devices as well, since Google is likely to build SPDY into browsers designed for Android
The speed with which a website responds to users is an increasingly important technical and economic issue. According to the content-delivery network Akamai, people only give a site three seconds, on average, to load before giving up and navigating away. Better performance often means more page views, and thus more interaction with users. For online shopping sites, this translates to higher sales.
It’s not just individual sites that have an interest in speeding up the Web. Google has been working to make the Web as a whole faster, reasoning that the entire experience needs to be lightning-quick and smooth to keep people happily using its many services. Google also hopes to entice people to use more Web services and less desktop software (see, for example, its Chrome OS), and the company knows this won’t be possible if they struggle with performance.
There are a lot of ways to speed up a website. Changing the protocols that determine how information gets sent over the Internet is potentially the most rewarding but also one of the trickiest. These protocols are fundamental to communication between websites and servers, so they can have far-reaching effects on website performance across all devices. However, to roll SPDY out to the entire world, all browser manufacturers would have to adopt it, and every server would have to support it, says Joshua Bixby, Strangeloop’s president
SPDY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY
Google speeds up the Web with SPDY
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/google-speeds-up-the-web-with-spdy/930
Network engineers and hard-core Web architects know that HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), the data transfer method used by the Web, isn’t the most efficient data transfer protocol around. So, back in November 2009, Google started working on a faster replacement: SPDY, pronounced “speedy.” And, now, if you’re using the Chrome Web browser, and visiting Google Web sites, you can see SPDY in action according to Conceivably Tech.
I’m inclined to believe these claims because when I opened some moderately complex spreadsheets in Google Docs using both Chrome 10 and Firefox 4, and taking into account their differences in JavaScript rendering speed, Chrome 10 was still rendering pages about 20% faster than Firefox from what I would have expected.
I saw similar results on Gmail, iGoogle, and Google Advanced Scholar Search. I don’t know about you, but a 20% boost in Web site performance is impressive to me.
When I used Google’s own SPDY benchmarking tool, I saw similar results. This only compares Chrome with and without SPDY activated, showed that SPDY gave me a 15% improvement in Web site performance.
I’ve seen claims that SPDY can cut Web page load speeds by 50%, but I didn’t see that kind of boost. Try it yourselves and let me know what you find.
