Web Performance Daybook Volume 2

Chapter 21. Introducing mod_spdy: A SPDY Module for the Apache HTTP Server

Bryan McQuade and Matthew Steele

At Google, we strive to make the whole Web fast. Our work in this area includes Page Speed Online, mod_pagespeed, Page Speed Service, Google Chrome, making TCP faster, and the SPDY protocol, among other efforts. The SPDY (pronounced “SPeeDY”) protocol allows websites to be transmitted more efficiently to the web browser, resulting in page load time improvements (http://blog.chromium.org/2009/11/2x-faster-web.html) of as much as 55%. To make it easier for websites to realize the benefits of SPDY, we’re releasing the source code for mod_spdy, an open-source module for the Apache HTTP server.

Getting Started with mod_spdy

mod_spdy is still in early beta, and is not yet recommended for deployment in production environments. If you’d like to test out mod_spdy and help us to make it better, please consult our Getting Started guide. We hoped to make it production-ready sometime in early 2012. Stay tuned by subscribing to our discussion forum.

SPDY and Apache

mod_spdy is an Apache 2.2-compatible module that provides SPDY support for Apache HTTP servers. Multiplexing is an important performance feature of SPDY which allows for multiple requests in a single SPDY session to be processed concurrently, and their responses interleaved down the wire. However, due to the serialized nature of the HTTP/1.1 protocol, the Apache HTTP server provides a one-request-per-connection architecture. Apache’s ...