Possibly the best part of working on Web performance is the community. It always amazes me how users, vendors, and even competitors work together to make the Web faster. Akamai does its best to support this community, through actions like sponsoring Web performance meetups and open-sourcing tools like Mobitest.

However, the most valuable resource Akamai has to offer this community arguably isn’t tools – it’s data. That’s the reason I’m really excited to share with you the launch of Akamai IO – The Akamai Internet Observatory.
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The SPDY benchmark I posted last week got some pretty heavy traffic, and I was happy to see it also sparked a lot of conversation and comments. Some of the comments were just trolls looking for attention (don’t feed them!). Others, however, held good ideas for follow up tests or suggestions for how to address the lack of acceleration.

Below is a collection of the top ideas that came up, and my thoughts on them.
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SPDY is awesome. It’s the first real upgrade to HTTP in 10+ years, it tackles high latency mobile networks performance issues and it makes the web more secure. SPDY is different than HTTP in many ways, but its primary value comes from being able to multiplex many requests/responses from client to server over a single (or few) TCP connections.

Previous benchmarks tout great benefits, ranging from making pages load 2x faster to making mobile sites 23% faster using SPDY and HTTPS than over clear HTTP. However, when testing real world sites I did not see any such gains. In fact, my tests showed SPDY is only marginally faster than HTTPS and is slower than HTTP.

Why? Simply put, SPDY makes HTTP better, but for most websites, HTTP is not the bottleneck.
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