Google promises SPDY web
The new SPDY protocol from Google is designed to augment HTTP and offers the possibility of vastly reduced load times.
The new system, dubbed SPDY and predictably pronounced SPeeDY, is described in a whitepaper over on the Chromium Developer Blog - via Slashdot - as "an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimal latency."
Designed to complement the HyperText Transfer Protocol rather than replace it, SPDY uses a combination of header compression, multiplexed streams, and traffic prioritisation to speed up the loading of a webpage - and in tests using the Chrome browser as a base, Google claims that SPDY has reduced page load times by up to a not-unimpressive 64 percent.
In order to further test the SPDY technology Google has developed a compatible in-memory web server which it plans to release under an open-source licence in the near future, along with a modified Chrome client which supports both plain HTTP and the new SPDY requests over both unencrypted and SSL connections. While the source for the SPDY-compatible Chrome client is available now, users won't see any speed benefits until servers start to support the protocol.
Does this sound like the sort of technology the web needs, or is it likely to be of more benefit to lossy and bandwidth-starved mobile clients than your average broadband-connected desktop? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyLike AshT said, gaming data is pretty well optimised, at least for modern games. As the article states, SPDY is more about compressing and prioritising to speed up the transfer of the HTTP code. Not sure how well prioritising will work, at the end of the day data can only be prioritised against other data, and I'm happy having gaming and VOIP as my highest. A few milliseconds in a webpage doesn't really bother me. If they can get speed increases without incurring performance loss over other data, then I'll happily take it but I wouldn't go out of my way to get it.
Well done, you just managed to turn a great thing in to s**te. By all means, don't use it if you want slower loading times. I am impressed with Google as a whole for all the things that they are doing, and wow, you figured out that Google make money from ads, my god, a company that wants to make a profit to fund all of these projects. Just die, please.
Woah, go easy now!
lol nice one. tho i do respect Google as a company as a whole and the tech they brought to the web, this statement is contains quite the irony.
ooookay....... have u had ur coffee this morning yet?
'My SPDY sense is tingling'
No, game traffic travels over TCP (as does HTTP), they are not re-writing the underlying architecture of the internet just the protocol most commonly used for sending web content.
So any other internet traffic (ftp, torrents etc) remain as is.
what about on other browsers?
IMO this would mostly benefit mobile or cellular connections. Most network operators have already expressed concerns that their architecture isn't scalable - both technologically and financially; we all want faster mobile data speeds, but nobody wants to pay more than the other guy on a different network, right? If this technology can be employed in the mobile arena, which Google is well positioned to do, it could be of massive benefit. I'm not sure what protocols are used by services like the Apple App store or even the Android marketplace, but I would imagine that HTTP traffic still represents a large share of the cellular data traffic flying over our heads. If network operators can squeeze more speed out of existing technology, it's going to give them an advantage in the market. Google already have their own OS out on mobile handsets and they are now developing an OS targeted at the netbook market - they've already stated that cloud-based applications will be a major part of Chrome OS.
It's not hard to see where Google thinks the smart money should go.
And, you can say what you like about Google hoarding your sensitive data and browsing habits, or serving up endless ads, but frankly I don't really care. Targeted advertising has been a goal for many an advertising executive for years, and Google seem to be doing pretty well at it. To say nothing of their operating systems or products, simply the fact that "google" is now recognised as a verb surely means that they must be doing something right - after all, how many people have "Bing'ed" or "Yahoo'ed" something.
Google have known this for ages. If you look at the source code for a google results page, almost all of the CSS/javascript is built into the page, rather than being referenced as external files. On top of that, they lump all the images into one, to reduce the number of image accesses:
http://www.google.com/images/nav_logo7.png
Using SPDY to combat high latency is certainly an excellent idea - for example on mobile broadband, you may get 2Mbit of throughput, but with a latency of 600ms per page item, so a 1kB PNG file effectively takes 600ms to load, and so does a 5kB CSS file; the 4kB of extra data is irrelevant when the latency is so large. If you could download them all at once, it'd make things much nippier.
Why do you think technologies like Flash, Silverlight and Java were invented in the first place? Because HTTP + HTML doesn't give us the interactivity and multimedia that we want.
A new application protocol would be nice which would put everything we now take for granted center stage instead of mere addons to an old technology.
wahey!