Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
SPDY is increasingly being used as an enhancement to HTTP/1.1. To understand its impact on performance, we conduct a systematic study of Web page load time (PLT) under SPDY and compare it to HTTP. To identify the factors that affect PLT, we proceed from simple, syn-thetic pages to complete page loads based on the top 200 Alexa sites. We find that SPDY provides a significant im-provement over HTTP when we ignore dependencies in the page load process and the effects of browser compu-tation. Most SPDY benefits stem from the use of a single TCP connection, but the same feature is also detrimen-tal under high packet loss. Unfortunately, the benefits can be easily overwhelmed by dependencies and com-putation, reducing the improvements with SPDY to 7% for our lower bandwidth and higher RTT scenarios. We also find that request prioritization is of little help, while server push has good potential; we present a push pol-icy based on dependencies that gives comparable perfor-mance to mod spdy while sending much less data. 1
Wang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.