8 ms·

HN no longer supporting SPDY

55 points by Mojah 13y ago

tinco 13y ago
This has been like this for some time, it was already so when the nginx vulnerability hit last week.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
nodata 13y ago
Anyone know where the push for SPDY is coming from? I thought it wasn't much faster (<5%) than http/https.
- drsintoma 13y ago
  I believe it has been Google all along, I guess when you do things at their scale this matters, but indeed I can't see any average dev rushing to support it.
- rdl 13y ago
  It's lower overhead for the server, too.
  - nodata 13y ago
    Do you know how much lower overhead?
    - rdl 13y ago
      Well, it's not just the front end; it's the load balancer and whatever other infrastructure, since it packs things into a single connection more effectively. For hn, not an issue (since it's a single nginx in front of a single threaded arc process). http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-best-practices http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-best-practices seems legit.
      - EvilLook 13y ago
        Have you measured your gains?
- ghayes 13y ago
  Tried to find where you pulled this number. This study seems in-line with your hypothesis (it states a gain over HTTPS, and a loss over HTTP): http://www.guypo.com/technical/not-as-spdy-as-you-thought/ http://www.guypo.com/technical/not-as-spdy-as-you-thought/
- FooBarWidget 13y ago
  It depends. I have a site with a lot of assets (about 70 images) and using SPDY made it 30% faster than plain HTTP thanks to better pipelining.
- mousefad 13y ago
  I believe some pron sites use it. The benefit increases with pages which have a lot of assets, which applies particularly well to typical pron sites with their multitude of images per page.
bhitov 13y ago
I'd be interested to know what kind of speed gains HN got from SPDY. I'd guess very low as there aren't many requests (per page load) to multiplex.
nodesocket 13y ago
I posted this 7 days ago... 2 upvotes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5666846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5666846
- user24 13y ago
  HN is not a competition or a game. Be glad that the story you thought was interesting has made it on to HN.
  - dsr_ 13y ago
    HN is not a competition, but it's as much of a game as each poster wants it to be. Karma is a feedback mechanism that acts as a proxy for what the community thinks of your contributions. Treat it as a game and it is one; for the most part ignore it, and you can still use and participate in HN.
  - NameNickHN 13y ago
    Then why do you get points for interacting?
    - user24 13y ago
      To keep the noise down. You can upvote, or comment "I agree". The latter is not scalable. It encourages good content from people.
      - tomp 13y ago
        Not really. You should upvote if you think the comment provides value, even if you disagree. You should downvote if the comment is wrong/invalid/offensive (as I did now, since I think your comment is wrong), not if you disagree.
        brudgers 13y ago
        If downvoting keeps someone from posting an argumentative reply to express their disagreement, HN is better for it. If upvoting a snarky comment keeps someone from posting a mean reply HN is better for that, too. People can vote however they damn well please without anyone shoulding upon them. Votes are an expression of something, whatever that something is is properly in the hands of the voter.
laumars 13y ago
> SPDY (pronounced speedy) I wish people would stop naming products like this (nginx and imgur are other examples that spring to mind) because it's a complete nightmare for dyslexics like myself. We have problems enough with spelling and pronunciation due to the vast and contradicting rules in the English language, but at least acronyms stand for something meaningful (eg I can remember KVM because it's a Kernel-based Virtual Machine). But names like SPDY are a nightmare because I have to remember which letters are dropped; and an even bigger nightmare to read as I need to memorize how it's intended to be pronounced rather than simply sounding out the letters like any other sane word would. What's more, I'm an English native. So I can't imagine how much harder names like this are non-English speakers too (and let's be honest, most of the worlds populous didn't learn English as their first language). So please, if you're in charge of naming a new product, think about the fact that not everyone in the world is as gifted at English as yourself; and that not everyone wants to learn a separate additional verbal and written rule for each and every proper-noun just because it's seemingly now 'cool' to use TXT SPK in names. </rant>
- ghayes 13y ago
  The process (for SPDY and nginx) is called disemvowelment[1], and I always thought it mostly had to do with securing short domain names. Scvngr comes to mind as an example of this. S-C-A-V-E-N-G-E-R. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disemvoweling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disemvoweling
  - laumars 13y ago
    It is mostly about securing short domain names. If I'm honest, I started getting sidetracked with my rant at that point. Though, to be fair, even the domain name argument is increasingly becoming moot as more and more TLD's are become available (eg .io). And personally I'd rather not have product names dictated by what URL looks prettier in someone's tweet (if they're that bothered, then why not have speedy.io and a Twitter friendly one that redirects)
    - kyrias 13y ago
drivebyacct2 13y ago
The extension was never lighting up for me withing hours of the posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5663692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5663692 (and it still doesn't light up)
mqzaidi 13y ago
spdycheck.org should also check the other assets on page to see if spdy is supported. In a lot of cases, it makes sense to only switch the asset/cdn server to spdy. Maybe there should be something like partial support, which should indicate what fraction of requests (by count and by size) support spdy.
thro-a-weigh 13y ago
Why would HN need it? Look at what assets the HN pages include and where they are sourced. There's no real benefit to be gained for the user. It would be faster and more efficient for the user if he could pipeline multiple HN pages (1,2,3,...) but that's exactly what pg stops you from doing with his fnid scheme. HTTP pipelining a la the HTTP/1.1 spec works fine. No additional software from Google is needed. You don't need SPDY to get speed gains. What you need to get the benefits of pipelining are sites that have decent Max-Results settings (100 is quite common) and that have many assets you want all served from the same IP. There are lots of those sites, but HN is not one of them.

55 points by Mojah 13y ago

tinco 13y ago

This has been like this for some time, it was already so when the nginx vulnerability hit last week.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

nodata 13y ago

Anyone know where the push for SPDY is coming from? I thought it wasn't much faster (<5%) than http/https.

drsintoma 13y ago
I believe it has been Google all along, I guess when you do things at their scale this matters, but indeed I can't see any average dev rushing to support it.
rdl 13y ago
It's lower overhead for the server, too.
- nodata 13y ago
  Do you know how much lower overhead?
  - rdl 13y ago
    Well, it's not just the front end; it's the load balancer and whatever other infrastructure, since it packs things into a single connection more effectively. For hn, not an issue (since it's a single nginx in front of a single threaded arc process). http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-best-practices http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-best-practices seems legit.
    - EvilLook 13y ago
      Have you measured your gains?
ghayes 13y ago
Tried to find where you pulled this number. This study seems in-line with your hypothesis (it states a gain over HTTPS, and a loss over HTTP): http://www.guypo.com/technical/not-as-spdy-as-you-thought/ http://www.guypo.com/technical/not-as-spdy-as-you-thought/
FooBarWidget 13y ago
It depends. I have a site with a lot of assets (about 70 images) and using SPDY made it 30% faster than plain HTTP thanks to better pipelining.
mousefad 13y ago
I believe some pron sites use it. The benefit increases with pages which have a lot of assets, which applies particularly well to typical pron sites with their multitude of images per page.

bhitov 13y ago

I'd be interested to know what kind of speed gains HN got from SPDY. I'd guess very low as there aren't many requests (per page load) to multiplex.

nodesocket 13y ago

I posted this 7 days ago... 2 upvotes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5666846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5666846

user24 13y ago
HN is not a competition or a game. Be glad that the story you thought was interesting has made it on to HN.
- dsr_ 13y ago
  HN is not a competition, but it's as much of a game as each poster wants it to be. Karma is a feedback mechanism that acts as a proxy for what the community thinks of your contributions. Treat it as a game and it is one; for the most part ignore it, and you can still use and participate in HN.
- NameNickHN 13y ago
  Then why do you get points for interacting?
  - user24 13y ago
    To keep the noise down. You can upvote, or comment "I agree". The latter is not scalable. It encourages good content from people.
    - tomp 13y ago
      Not really. You should upvote if you think the comment provides value, even if you disagree. You should downvote if the comment is wrong/invalid/offensive (as I did now, since I think your comment is wrong), not if you disagree.
      - brudgers 13y ago
        If downvoting keeps someone from posting an argumentative reply to express their disagreement, HN is better for it. If upvoting a snarky comment keeps someone from posting a mean reply HN is better for that, too. People can vote however they damn well please without anyone shoulding upon them. Votes are an expression of something, whatever that something is is properly in the hands of the voter.

laumars 13y ago

> SPDY (pronounced speedy) I wish people would stop naming products like this (nginx and imgur are other examples that spring to mind) because it's a complete nightmare for dyslexics like myself. We have problems enough with spelling and pronunciation due to the vast and contradicting rules in the English language, but at least acronyms stand for something meaningful (eg I can remember KVM because it's a Kernel-based Virtual Machine). But names like SPDY are a nightmare because I have to remember which letters are dropped; and an even bigger nightmare to read as I need to memorize how it's intended to be pronounced rather than simply sounding out the letters like any other sane word would. What's more, I'm an English native. So I can't imagine how much harder names like this are non-English speakers too (and let's be honest, most of the worlds populous didn't learn English as their first language). So please, if you're in charge of naming a new product, think about the fact that not everyone in the world is as gifted at English as yourself; and that not everyone wants to learn a separate additional verbal and written rule for each and every proper-noun just because it's seemingly now 'cool' to use TXT SPK in names. </rant>

ghayes 13y ago
The process (for SPDY and nginx) is called disemvowelment[1], and I always thought it mostly had to do with securing short domain names. Scvngr comes to mind as an example of this. S-C-A-V-E-N-G-E-R. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disemvoweling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disemvoweling
- laumars 13y ago
  It is mostly about securing short domain names. If I'm honest, I started getting sidetracked with my rant at that point. Though, to be fair, even the domain name argument is increasingly becoming moot as more and more TLD's are become available (eg .io). And personally I'd rather not have product names dictated by what URL looks prettier in someone's tweet (if they're that bothered, then why not have speedy.io and a Twitter friendly one that redirects)
  - kyrias 13y ago

drivebyacct2 13y ago

The extension was never lighting up for me withing hours of the posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5663692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5663692 (and it still doesn't light up)

mqzaidi 13y ago

spdycheck.org should also check the other assets on page to see if spdy is supported. In a lot of cases, it makes sense to only switch the asset/cdn server to spdy. Maybe there should be something like partial support, which should indicate what fraction of requests (by count and by size) support spdy.

thro-a-weigh 13y ago

Why would HN need it? Look at what assets the HN pages include and where they are sourced. There's no real benefit to be gained for the user. It would be faster and more efficient for the user if he could pipeline multiple HN pages (1,2,3,...) but that's exactly what pg stops you from doing with his fnid scheme. HTTP pipelining a la the HTTP/1.1 spec works fine. No additional software from Google is needed. You don't need SPDY to get speed gains. What you need to get the benefits of pipelining are sites that have decent Max-Results settings (100 is quite common) and that have many assets you want all served from the same IP. There are lots of those sites, but HN is not one of them.