Facebook Adds SPDY Support | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Adds SPDY Support

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70 pointscleverjake27 comments

It looks like nginx will soon have SPDY v2/v3 support built-in[0] (rather than having to recompile) which should definitely help to boost support as well.

[0]: http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/roadmap

Nice.

Question: I'm wondering if anyone has ideas for any startup/business opportunities related to SPDY? (Except "work for hire" on implementing it or consulting regarding deploying it..)

Outside of implementing it, I'm not sure what work there is to do. Especially once the major CDNs get on it. There are some opportunities to serve things in a more novel way using its piplining, but otherwise...im not sure what you could do outside of consultancy.

I'd bet there is a market for a "plug-and-play" way to get SPDY working on top of IIS.

You could use StrangeLoop to do that.

Sweet! Subjectively, the page does load faster. I'm now loading Facebook over SPDY over IPv6 and feeling a bit futuristic :)

This is awesome. I'm still waiting for some of the larger CDNs to provide this as an option, but realistically don't expect it to happen until the working group gets closer to having a ratified and finalized spec.

At that point shouldn't it be adopted by the HTTP2.0 people and simply renamed to that (with some minor changes)? I think if that happens it will speed adoption but I'm not clear on the timeline.

Also, curios, Facebook is using Version 2 and Google is serving Version 3.

The HTTP/2.0 WG is rethinking every little part of SPDY, so I expect it to take several years.

Seems like Facebook doesn't turn on SPDY for all its CDNs yet. I only see SPDY turned on for sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net and photos-a.xx.fbcdn.net, which only serve a rather small portion of all the static assets. The lion share of its assets are mainly served through fbstatic-a.akamaihd.net, fbcdn-photos-a.akamaihd.net and other *.akamaihd.net domains, which aren't SPDY-enabled currently.

Mainly because those come from Akamai. Facebook would likely be able to add SPDY to their own services, but it's up to Akamai to start doing something on their side.

Don't hold your breath.

Akamai did announce upcoming SPDY support late last year:

* https://blogs.akamai.com/2012/07/spdy-and-websocket-support-...

Wow, that's actually great news.

For the curious, you can view current SPDY sessions in Chrome via chrome://net-internals/#spdy

For Firefox, you can install the SPDY Indicator without restarting. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/spdy-indicato...

Chrome SPDY Indicator extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spdy-indicator/mpb...

There's also a SPDY indicator add-on for firefox, which shows up whenever you are connected to a site using it.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/spdy-indicato...

Edit: sp332 beat me to it.

Opera: https://addons.opera.com/en-gb/extensions/details/spdy-indic...

Is there a list anywhere of all of the technologies that people use in a web stack and what the status of their SPDY support is? For example, we use Jetty, nginx, and ELB, and I imagine they all need to support spdy before we can allow our users to.

I don't think they all need to support SPDY - as long as the proxy closest to the users supports it the stuff behind can run on regular HTTP (unless you're doing websockets stuff). nginx for example has a SPDY module, so if you put that in front of Jetty you can serve SPDY without any problems.

It also depends which SPDY features you want to take advantage of. SPDY has content push support, for example, so if you're serving a page and know which assets it will require, you can serve those without waiting for the client to receive your initial response and request them. So far as I know, the nginx SPDY proxy doesn't try to do any of this (and it probably doesn't make sense for it to do so).

If you're using ELB as the parent mentioned, SPDY wont be viable (yet).

I've wanted to add something like this to spdycheck.org. Right now I know of mod_spdy with Apache, and nginx has it too. Hosting providers are backing it in as well (Dreamhost has it as a option, with mod_pagespeed as well which is pretty cool). Hosted CMS solutions are another good place where this is happening. Wordpress.com provides it. I seem to remember hearing that Tomcat/Jetty has support, but I don't honestly know enough about how those frameworks plug into web servers to know if they can in fact at something like SPDY into the HTTP stack.

Anyone else have a list?

You can get many of the benefits of SPDY today by using Cloudflare:

http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-spdy

Nice! Thanks Billy for uncovering this.

Sure thing. It was just so weird before that they had implemented the NPN extension into their ServerHello, but only advertised http/1.1. Its possible I'm just in a big A/B testing group, but unlikely. Really should have a way to poll hostnames and look for changes like this

Advertising http/1.1 via npn enables tls false start.

http://www.imperialviolet.org/2012/04/11/falsestart.html

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