The "Waiting" time listed in the Network panel of Chrome is actually the TTFB for each HTTP request/response. It is the latency from browser to server, server p

The "Waiting" time listed in the Network panel of Chrome is actually the TTFB for each HTTP request/response. It is the latency from browser to server, server processing, and latency coming back. And because of the difference between latency and our huge bandwidth connections, your browser spends most of its HTTP networking time waiting. This is exactly where the "SPDY vs HTTP" factor comes in. With HTTP, you request each item, and wait for a response. This can only be done one item at a time[1] per HTTP/TCP connection, with a limit of 2-6 (depending on the browser) HTTP/TCP connections per unique hostname. As I mentioned in a comment below, this benchmark is using a single hostname, which is the worse possible situation for HTTP. SPDY, or HTTP/2, instead using a single TCP connection, and multiplexes all the requests over it. In other words it can be downloading pieces of many other responses, all while waiting on other requests. [1] - Yes, I am ignoring HTTP pipelining, because every other person who implemented a piece of HTTP software did as well. And no, neither I nor anyone else cares about older Opera supporting it :-)