The SPDY Protocol is likely going to be the successor of http. This short talk summarizes the most important points and includes a demo on how to migrate a Wordpress blog on httpd.

1. Fabian Lange
SPDY - http reloaded

2. (WILL BE) PART OF HTTP/2.0

3. HTTP Problems
• Single request per connection. Because HTTP can only fetch one resource at a time (HTTP
pipelining helps, but still enforces only a FIFO queue), a server delay of 500 ms prevents
reuse of the TCP channel for additional requests. Browsers work around this problem by
using multiple connections. Since 2008, most browsers have finally moved from 2
connections per domain to 6.
• Exclusively client-initiated requests. In HTTP, only the client can initiate a request. Even if
the server knows the client needs a resource, it has no mechanism to inform the client and
must instead wait to receive a request for the resource from the client.
• Uncompressed request and response headers. Request headers today vary in size from
~200 bytes to over 2KB. As applications use more cookies and user agents expand
features, typical header sizes of 700-800 bytes is common. For modems or ADSL
connections, in which the uplink bandwidth is fairly low, this latency can be
significant. Reducing the data in headers could directly improve the serialization latency to
send requests.
• Redundant headers. In addition, several headers are repeatedly sent across requests on the
same channel. However, headers such as the User-Agent, Host, and Accept* are generally
static and do not need to be resent.
• Optional data compression. HTTP uses optional compression encodings for data. Content
should always be sent in a compressed format.
Source: http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper

4. Web Requests Are Simple
• Open a connection
• Send a request
• Receive a response
• Done

6. Transfer per Page

7. How to Avoid Requests
• Caching
• Domain Sharding
– Browser Limits
• Keep Alive
– Dedicated Connections
– Waste Ressources
• Pipelining

8. TCP Handshake
0ms 1) Host A sends a TCP SYNchronize packet to Host B
25ms 2) Host B receives A's SYN
25ms 3) Host B sends a SYNchronize-ACKnowledgement
50ms 4) Host A receives B's SYN-ACK
75ms 5) Host A sends ACKnowledge and data
75ms 6) Host B receives ACK and data.
• With a "distance" of just 25ms, this takes
us 75ms until data arrives at server

10. Initial Window
• Congestion Control Mechanism
• Avoid overloading clients
• Each ACK of the client increases
window
• RFC 3390
– Increasing icwnd
– Small Resonses are complete without ACK
– Avoid the ACK RTT

11. Pushing over http
• Push === Long Polling
• Consumes one connection on clients
• On server
– Used to be expensive to hold
– Modern servers have evented I/O
• WebSockets

12. Headers
http://blog.codecentric.de/
Accept text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate
Accept-Language de-de,de;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
Connection keep-alive
__utma=40497137.1800912468.1315901303.1328525769.1328537171.234;
__utmz=40497137.1326462670.198.110.utmcsr=twitterfeed|utmccn=blogfee
d_de|utmcmd=twitter; wp-settings-
3=editor%3Dhtml%26m0%3Do%26m1%3Do%26m2%3Do%26m3%3Dc%2
6m4%3Do%26m5%3Do%26m6%3Do%26m7%3Do%26m8%3Do%26m9%3
Cookie
Do%26m10%3Do%26m11%3Do%26align%3Dcenter%26imgsize%3Dfull%2
6urlbutton%3Dnone%26hidetb%3D0; wp-settings-time-3=1328519940;
__utma=162617902.1417890302.1315914276.1328537194.1328541774.63;
__utmz=162617902.1328537194.62.41.utmcsr=blog.codecentric.de|utmccn
=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/; wp-settings-time-81=1321966374
Host blog.codecentric.de
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:10.0) Gecko/20100101
User-Agent
Firefox/10.0

13. Headers
http://blog.codecentric.de/files/2012/02/adlite.png
Accept image/png,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate
Accept-Language de-de,de;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
Connection keep-alive
__utma=162617902.1417890302.1315914276.1328537194.1328541774.63;
__utmz=162617902.1328537194.62.41.utmcsr=blog.codecentric.de|utmccn=(referral)
|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/; wp-settings-
Cookie
3=m0%3Do%26m1%3Do%26m5%3Do%26m4%3Do%26editor%3Dhtml%26wplink%
3D1%26align%3Dcenter%26imgsize%3Dfull%26hidetb%3D1%26m7%3Do%26m9%
3Do; wp-settings-time-3=1326290899
Host blog.codecentric.de
Referer http://blog.codecentric.de/
User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:10.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0

14. Content Compression
• Gzip is optional
• But generally best practice
LoadModule deflate_module /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_deflate.so

15. SPDY TO THE RESCUE

16. SPDY Solutions
• Allow many concurrent HTTP requests to run across a
single TCP session.
• Reduce the bandwidth currently used by HTTP by
compressing headers and eliminating unnecessary
headers.
• Make SSL the underlying transport protocol, for better
security and compatibility with existing network
infrastructure. Although SSL does introduce a latency
penalty, we believe that the long-term future of the web
depends on a secure network connection. In addition, the
use of SSL is necessary to ensure that communication
across existing proxies is not broken.
• Enable the server to initiate communications with the
client and push data to the client whenever possible.
Source: http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper

17. Connection Multiplexing
• Single TCP Connection transports all
requests
• TCP Handshake still exists
• Inital cwnd should be 16

18. Compression
• All data is compressed
• Includes headers
• Redundand data is removed
– User Agent of second request is known to
be same as on first

19. CRIME
• Compression Ratio Info-leak Made
Easy
• Cookie value can be detected when
compression is effective
Sources:
threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/new-attack-uses-ssltls-information-leak-hijack-https-sessions-090512
security.stackexchange.com/questions/19911/crime-how-to-beat-the-beast-successor/19914

20. Cookie: JSESSIONID=1234
c: jid=1234
d: kje=2345

21. Cookie: JSESSIONID=1234 Cookie: JSESSIONID=9876
X[i] = c: jid=
[i]1234 [i]9876
Y[j] = d: kje=
[j]2345 [j]0987

22. Cookie: JSESSIONID=1234 Cookie: JSESSIONID=1235
X[i] = c: jid=123
[i]4 [i]5
Y[j] = d: kje=234
[j]5 [j]6

23. Fixes
• Don't compress headers
• Use a compressor that is not affected

24. SSL
• Not said to be a problem with HTTP
• SSL should be default
– But actually expensive
• SSL hides SPDY traffic, so that proxies
don't break it 

25. Pushing
• Long Lasting Connection By Design
• Send does not close the "request"
• Two flavors
– Server push
– Server hint

26. Compatibility
• SPDY is backwards compatible
• Uses Next Protocol Negotiation
– tools.ietf.org/html/draft-agl-tls-
nextprotoneg-02

27. Adoption
• Facebook implements and favors SPDY
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2012JulSep/0251.html
• Twitter implements and favors SPDY
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2012JulSep/0250.html
• Google implements and favors SPDY
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2012JulSep/0219.html
• Mozilla implements and favors SPDY
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2012JulSep/0156.html
• Wordpress.com uses SPDY
https://twitter.com/wordpressdotcom/statuses/238741078172389377

28. Concerns
• Encryption by default renders network
caching useless

29. SPDY Support
Clients Server
• Chrome • Apache mod_spdy
– since 11 • erlang-spdy
– Ice Cream Sandwich
• node-spdy
• Amazon Silk • Netty 3.3.1
– Kindle Fire
– Means JBoss
• Firefox • Jetty 7.6.2
– Since 13
• Ngnix 1.3
• Opera
– Since 12.1
• Tomcat 8.0.0-dev

31. SPDY Drafts
• dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-protocol/spdy-protocol-
draft1
– First draft 2009
• dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-protocol/spdy-protocol-
draft2
– Changes to server push
• dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-protocol/spdy-protocol-
draft3
– Flow control
• Draft 4 will feature compression and QoS changes

32. DEMO: MIGRATING PHP ON
APACHE TO SUPPORT SPDY

33. PHP is not Threadsafe
• The way SPDY works is incompatible
with non threadsafe implementations
– one connection one httpd worker
– But multiple requests
• Zend Threadsafe does not support
some features (mysql!)
• Need to externalize it with cgi

34. mod_php to mod_fcgid + php
• yum install mod_fcgid
• vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
<Directory "/var/www/html">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI
</Directory>
• mv /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf
/etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf.bak
• vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/fcgid.conf

35. DirectoryIndex index.php
AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi .php
DefaultInitEnv PHPRC "/etc/"
MaxRequestsPerProcess 1000
MaxProcessCount 10
MaxRequestLen 209715200
IPCCommTimeout 240
IdleTimeout 240
FCGIWrapper /usr/bin/php-cgi .php

36. mod_prefork to mod_worker
• Needs recompilation
• Luckily we have both already 
– httpd -V | grep MPM
– httpd.worker -V | grep MPM
• sudo vi /etc/init.d/httpd
httpd=${HTTPD-
/usr/sbin/httpd.worker}
prog=httpd.worker

37. mod_ssl
• We need mod_ssl patched with NPN
• yum install subversion curl gcc-
c++ patch binutils make
• mkdir modssl; cd modssl
• svn export http://mod-
spdy.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/
build_modssl_with_npn.sh
• ./build_modssl_with_npn.sh
• cp /root/modssl/mod_ssl.so
/etc/httpd/modules/mod_ssl.so

38. [root@centos57 modssl]# ./build_modssl_with_npn.sh
Using buildroot: /tmp/tmp.CooHIy8770
Downloading http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-1.0.1-beta2.tar.gz
######################################################################## 100.0%
Downloading http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/httpd-2.2.21.tar.gz
######################################################################## 100.0%
Downloading https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/attachment.cgi?id=27969context=patch
######################################################################## 100.0%
Uncompressing openssl-1.0.1-beta2.tar.gz ... done
Uncompressing httpd-2.2.21.tar.gz ... done
Applying Apache mod_ssl NPN patch ...
patching file modules/ssl/ssl_private.h
patching file modules/ssl/ssl_engine_init.c
patching file modules/ssl/ssl_engine_io.c
patching file modules/ssl/ssl_engine_kernel.c
patching file modules/ssl/mod_ssl.c
patching file modules/ssl/mod_ssl.h
done
Configuring OpenSSL ... done
Building OpenSSL (this may take a while) ... done
Configuring Apache mod_ssl ... done
Building Apache mod_ssl (this may take a while) ... done
Generated mod_ssl.so at /root/modssl/mod_ssl.so.

39. mod_spdy
• Built from source
• mkdir mod_spdy; cd mod_spdy
• svn co
http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/tools/depot_tools
• export PATH="$PATH":`pwd`/depot_tools
• gclient config http://mod-
spdy.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src
• gclient sync --force
• cd src; make BUILDTYPE=Release
• sudo cp out/Release/libmod_spdy.so
/etc/httpd/modules/mod_spdy.so
• vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/spdy.conf
LoadModule spdy_module /etc/httpd/modules/mod_spdy.so
SpdyEnabled on

40. chrome://net-internals/#spdy

42. Is it spdy?
• www.devthought.com/2012/03/10/chro
me-spdy-indicator/
• ckon.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/spdy-
indicator-for-firefox/

43. HTTP
2.07
seconds

44. HTTPS
4.94
seconds

45. SPDY
2.65
seconds

46. real HTTP
17.83
seconds

47. real SPDY
11.70
seconds

48. Online Demo
• www.modspdy.com/world-flags/

49. www.belshe.com/2012/08/20/visualizing-spdy-vs-http

50. LET'S MAKE THE WEB
FASTER