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HTTP Intermediary Layer From Google Could Dramatically Speed Up the Web
grmoc writes "As part of the 'Let's make the web faster' initiative, we (a few engineers — including me! — at Google, and hopefully people all across the community soon!) are experimenting with alternative protocols to help reduce the latency of Web pages. One of these experiments is SPDY (pronounced 'SPeeDY'), an application-layer protocol (essentially a shim between HTTP and the bits on the wire) for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimal latency. In addition to a rough specification for the protocol, we have hacked SPDY into the Google Chrome browser (because it's what we're familiar with) and a simple server testbed. Using these hacked up bits, we compared the performance of many of the top 25 and top 300 websites over both HTTP and SPDY, and have observed those pages load, on average, about twice as fast using SPDY. Thats not bad! We hope to engage the open source community to contribute ideas, feedback, code (we've open sourced the protocol, etc!), and test results."
No. Akamai gives boxes to ISPs that cache Akamai's customer's content closer to the ISP's customers. Akamai then uses logic they've put together into DNS to redirect requests to the appliance closest to the request.
AOL actually does something similar to this with their TopSpeed technology, and it does work very, very well. It has introduced features like multiplexed persistent connections to the intermediary layer, sending down just object deltas since last visit (for if-modified-since requests), and applying gzip compression to uncompressed objects on the wire. It's one of the best technologies they've introduced. And, in full disclosure, I was proud to be a part of the team that made it all possible. It's too bad all of this is specific to the AOL software, so I'm glad a name like Google is trying to open up these kind of features to the general internet.
The good news is that SPDY seems to build on the SMUX ( http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-mux ) and MUX protocols that were designed as part of the HTTP-NG effort, so at least we're not reinventing the wheel. Now we have to decide what color to paint it.
Next up: immediate support in FireFox, WebKit, and Apache -- and deafening silence from IE and IIS.
Gopher is not installed by default, kiddie...
Gopher is installed by default on most builds of Firefox. Try this in your address bar: gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/world
Paid Q&A/Research
Someone already invented this.
It's called Opera browser
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Right now the plan is to use port 443. We may as well make the web a safer place while we make it faster. .. what we have planned right now, is:
The plans for indicating how a client/server speaks SPDY is still somewhat up in the air..
UPGRADE (ye olde HTTP UPGRADE).
and, putting some string into the SSL handshake that allows both sides to advertise which protocols they speak. If both speak SPDY, then it can be used.
This is nice because you don't have the additional latency of an additional roundtrip (and that latency can be large!)