Zack Tollman suggested I try out SPDY with my updated Nginx install. While I’m sad at the idea of giving up a plain text HTTP API, I was curious to see what SPDY looked like on this site.
I was disappointed with the results. The fastest page load time out of 5 runs without SPDY was 1.039 s. With SPDY the fastest result was 1.273 s. I then did several more runs of the same test with SPDY enabled to see if any of them could get close to the 1.0 s base line. None of them did, most came in close to 2 seconds. I had honestly expected to see SPDY perform better. That said this type of testing is not particularly rigorous, so take these numbers with a sufficiently large grain of salt.
Given the initial poor showing of SPDY in these tests I’m going to leave it turned off for now.
4 replies on “Tried Out SPDY”
Hi Joseph!
I’m flummoxed. What metric were you using to test this? How did you test it? Did you run multiple tests?
I would love to see you turn it back on so I can poke at it 😉 I’m just not convinced that it would be slower.
I did run multiple tests, and the page load time was always slower with SPDY. It was a result I was surprised by as well.
It could be anything though, including the low end VM that I’m using at DigitalOcean.
If you are inclined to do it again, I would love to see it in action. SPDY is still relatively new and it certainly could be that in some situations, it is actually slower or just plain contraindicated. With your site, you have very few assets, so it is possible that SPDY would provide little gains.
I may look at upgraded to Nginx 1.6 and then enabling it again, see if that makes any difference.