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1Pronounced Just As It Appears
SPDY (derived from the word “speedy” rather than an acronym) is a TCP-based application-level protocol for transporting Web content. It is proposed by Google and is being developed as one of their Chromium open-source projects. A white paper on SPDY states that it is intended to augment, rather than replace, HTTP.
2Who Knew?
3The Web, Circa 1998
Back in the day of the Apple iMac, large and heavy monitors, and largely static Web pages (remember GeoCities?), Web protocols were generally within their workload boundaries, because not a lot was asked in terms of performance. However, all this has changed greatly in 13 years—especially with the advent of millions of connected mobile devices pounding on Web servers 24/7.
4Wasted Capacity on Current Web
5What Exactly Is SPDY?
SPDY multipurposes, compresses, prioritizes, encrypts and then proactively pushes out the Web content faster than any current protocol can. Google, in tests within its own system over the last two years, has seen a steady 15 percent performance improvement during that time—and that’s a conservative estimate.
6How the HPC Sites Work
7Baseline vs. Progressive Page Loading
8Web Metrics That Tell a Story
All of these familiar Web metrics (connections per Web page, kilobytes loaded, total packets sent, HTTP downloads) indicate that SPDY offers big advantages for higher performance in Web-page downloads. The biggest one, obviously, is a 51 percent reduction in kilobytes uploaded. Google is using this protocol in all of its corporate Websites.
915 Percent Overall Speed Improvement
In all its studies over the last two years that SPDY has been a Google project, Web performance has shown a solid and steady 15 percent improvement. Lay that over large enterprise systems with high-transaction applications, and that can mean substantial improvements in overall IT performance, storage capacity and costs.
10So Where Is It in the Process?
SPDY is now enabled for all Google-related SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) traffic and is included in Chrome 6. Cotendo is the first actual service provider, and a third-party server implementation has been developed by Strangeloop. It will take years for it to be implemented across the World Wide Web. But all IT starts small and, if successful, gets big.