Seeking two clarifications on your 3rd figure:

1. The bi-directional arrow with “SSL sites are end-to-end encrypted too” – is this actually a two-part connection, with SSL between the client and SPDY gateway, and separate SSL between the SPDY gateway and the Web server? Or is this simply what you’re alluding to in comment 5 about “SSL authentication to your proxy”? If there’s a true “end-to-end” connection, this would preclude caching (which seems like another sizeable advantage), correct?
2. And in the event SSL is true end-to-end, does this inhibit the operation of the SPDY gateway in any other way, or would the gateway simply forward on packets based on IP addresses?

Cheers, Bryce.

It will be interesting to see how SPDY behaves over PEPs which are notoriously known to change HTTP/TCP behaviour.

I do not see the need for TCP to follow slow-start after idle..It can keep the same cwnd before idle, but must ensure it responds to congestion appropriately. A few RTTs of aggressiveness may not be harmful IMHO..

One question, though, that’s concerned me. If SPDY requires going through a proxy such as Amazon, are we opening up additional opportunities for information about our browsing to be acquired and mined?

VPN tunneling (for those of us dinosaurs still using desktop machines) would be another riff on the amazon use case you describe, no?

I think it’s funny out of all the billionaires in the US, Mark Cuban came out and pointed risk-reward on CEO salary. Until just the past year, he has been doing exactly the same with his NBA Mavericks team. Giving out ridiculous contract to mediocre players who shown little value to the team, granted his method actually worked the past year, while it did not for New Yorks Knicks. But there are many other area of society where risk-reward is out of wack (i.e. sports, hollywood, some may say this is true in technology), should we also tackle those industries and bring justice to the shareholder?

Great post – very thought provoking. As one of the inventors of Mod_Gzip we know a little about speeding up the Internet so I thought I would post an equally thought provoking comment back.

I think everyone is missing the proverbial performance boat here. How about sending “less data” and making that data “more relevant”. The single biggest problem on the Internet has always been “DEVCAP” (Device Capability). You never really know what the device connecting is capable of doing, especially in the case of Mobile. So why not add more X header data to the protocol which gives you more context about Who’s at the other end, What their device is capable of, and Where they are. Now knowing all that information “ahead of time” means that you can dump a ton of JavaScript and other “stuff” and instead generate a page in real time that exactly conforms to the persons desires, device capabilities and location.

Just using the above approach could accelerate the response by 75% or more. Now throw in all the SPDY “stuff” and you’ve got yourself something that scales to every device that I connect with.

In essence – the Web that we know becomes the Web that knows us. (And privacy is easily solved – make it opt in with a privacy setting in the browser that allows you to control what is sent).

Bottom line – a vastly accelerated Internet that is personal.