Slashdot Mirror
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."
From the link
We downloaded 25 of the "top 100" websites over simulated home network connections, with 1% packet loss. We ran the downloads 10 times for each site, and calculated the average page load time for each site, and across all sites. The results show a speedup over HTTP of 27% - 60% in page load time over plain TCP (without SSL), and 39% - 55% over SSL.
1. Look at top 100 websites.
2. Choose the 25 which give you good numbers and ignore the rest.
3. PROFIT!
The problem isn't pushing the bits across the wire. Major sites that load slowly today (like Slashdot) typically do so because they have advertising code that blocks page display until the ad loads. The ad servers are the bottleneck. Look at the lower left of the Mozilla window and watch the "Waiting for ..." messages.
Even if you're blocking ad images, there's still the delay while successive "document.write" operations take place.
Then there are the sites that load massive amounts of canned CSS and Javascript. (Remember how CSS was supposed to make web pages shorter and faster to load? NOT.)
Then there are the sites that load a skeletal page which then makes multiple requests for XML for the actual content.
Loading the base page just isn't the problem.
While we're at it, let's also make processing web pages faster.
We have a semantic language (HTML) and a language that describes how to present that (CSS), right? This is good, let's keep it that way.
But things aren't as good as they could be. On the semantic side, we have many elements in the language that don't really convey any semantic information, and a lot of semantics there isn't an element for. On the presentation side, well, suffice it to say that there are a _lot_ of things that cannot be done, and others that can be done, but only with ugly kludges. Meanwhile, processing and rendering HTML and CSS takes a lot of resources.
Here is my proposal:
- For the semantics, let's introduce an extensible language. Imagine it as a sort of programming language, where the standard library has elements for common things like paragraphs, hyperlinks, headings, etc. and there are additional libraries which add more specialized elements, e.g. there could be a library for web fora (or blogs, if you prefer), a library for screenshot galleries, etc.
- For the presentation, let's introduce something that actually supports the features of the presentation medium. For example, for presentation on desktop operating systems, you would have support for things like buttons and checkboxes, fonts, drawing primitives, and events like keypresses and mouse clicks. Again, this should be a modular system, where you can, for example, have a library to implement the look of your website, which you can then re-use in all your pages.
- Introduce a standard for the distribution of the various modules, to facilitate re-use (no having to download a huge library on every page load).
- It could be beneficial to define both a textual, human readable form and a binary form that can be efficiently parsed by computers. Combined with a mapping between the two, you can have the best of both worlds: efficient processing by machine, and readable by humans.
- There needn't actually be separate languages for semantics, presentation and scripting; it can all be done in a single language, thus simplifying things
I'd be working on this if my job didn't take so much time and energy, but, as it is, I'm just throwing these ideas out here.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Which of course led to quite amusing results when some failure of a web developer made an app that performed actions from GET requests. I've heard anecdotes of entire databases being deleted by a web accelerator in these cases.
From RFC2616:
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
http://www.goatse.cx/
How about we don't use HTTP/HTML for things they were not designed or ever intended to do? You know, that "right tool for the right job" thing.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
It's also why smart users filter them outright with something like AdBlock - anything that I see in the browser history that looks like a tracking/stats domain or URL gets blocked on sight. Come to think of it, I could probably clean it up publish it as an AdBlock filter list if anyone's interested; there's only a few dozen entries on there at the moment, but I'm sure that would grow pretty quickly if it was used by a more general and less paranoid userbase.
What's paranoid about insisting that a company bring a proposal, make me an offer, and sign a contract if they want to derive monetary value from my personal data? Instead, they feel my data is free for the taking and this entitlement mentality is the main reason why I make an effort to block all forms of tracking. I never gave consent to anyone to track anything I do, so why should I honor an agreement in which I did not participate? The "goodness" or "evil-ness" of their intentions doesn't even have to be a consideration. Sorry but referring to that as "paranoid" is either an attempt to demagogue it, or evidence that someone else's attempt to demagogue it was successful on you.
Are some people quite paranoia? Sure. Does that mean you should throw out all common sense, pretend like there are only paranoid reasons to disallow tracking, and ignore all reasonable concerns? No. Sure, someone who paints with a broad brush might notice that your actions (blocking trackers) superficially resemble some actions taken by paranoid people. Allowing that to affect your decison-making only empowers those who are superficial and quick to assume because you are kowtowing to them. This is what insecure people do. If the paranoid successfully tarnish the appearance of an otherwise reasonable action because we care too much about what others may think, it can only increase the damage caused by paranoia.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
It's not all rosy as the short documentation page explains. While they are trying to maximize throughput and minimize latency, they are hurting other areas. 2 obvious downsides I see are:
1. Server would now have to keep holding the connection open to the client throughout the client's session, and also keep the associated resources in memory. While this may not be a problem for Google and their seemingly limitless processing powers, a Joe Webmaster will see their web server load average increase significantly. HTTP servers usually give you control over this with the HTTP keep-alive time and max connections/children settings. If the server is now required to keep the connections open it would spell more hardware for many/most websites;
2. Requiring compression seems silly to me. This would increase the processing power required on the web server (see above), and also on the client - think underpowered portable devices. It needs to stay optional - if the client and server both play and prefer compression, then they should do it; if not, then let them be; also keeping in mind that all images, video and other multimedia are already compressed - so adding compression to these items would increase the server/client load _and_ increase payload.
Cache headers are set to one week so unless you're clearing your cache every page load it's amounts to nothing.
If anything the scripts are bigger, but again, cached. Besides AJAX comments were a huge improvement for those of us on dialup- no more loading the whole page every time you did anything.
CSS and JS, when used correctly make things faster for users, even (and sometimes especially) for those of us on slow connections.
Slasdhot should track where moderators spend their mod points. Those who spend it all on the first five posts should be disqualified from moderating.