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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."
Now we can see Uncle Goatse twice as fast.
And all other "add this piece of Javascript to your Web page and make it more awesomer!"
Yes, yes, they're useful. And you can't fathom a future without them. But in the meantime I'm watching my status bar say, "completed 4 of 5 items", then change to "completed 11 of 27 items", to "completed 18 of 57 items", to "completed... oh screw this, you're downloading the whole Internet, just sit back, relax and watch the blinkenlights".
Remember when a 768kbps DSL line was whizzo fast? Because all it had to download was some simple HTML, maybe some gifs?
I want my old Internet back. And a pony.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
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.
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.
here's an onion to hang on your belt, granpa.
now, on a more serious note, isn't gopher a faster protocol than HTTP ? could we just use it to transport html, pictures, etc ?
What ? Me, worry ?
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
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