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.