spdy faster than keep-alive https?

Question

I've seen Is SPDY any different than http multiplexing over keep alive connections and Difference between HTTP pipeling and HTTP multiplexing with SPDY but also http://www.guypo.com/technical/not-as-spdy-as-you-thought/.

I've even noticed that both are just a few ms more than ping in my own experience.

Am I missing something? I used this to install http://www.howtoforge.com/using-mod_spdy-with-apache2-on-ubuntu-12.10. Is there a setting I missed?

Answer 1

This question is far too vague to be able to be effectively answered. SPDY provides frame-based multiplexing over a single connection. A frame may correspond to HTTP request headers, or HTTP request body chunks, or HTTP response headers, or HTTP response body chunks. If you only use one request/response, then SPDY will provide minimal advantage (there's some, probably minimal, latency advantage if you assume CPU is cheap, since the header compression will trade off CPU time and memory for bytes on the wire, which is the primary input into serialization latency).