Thursday, March 8, 2012

Twitter, SPDY, and Firefox

Well - look at what this morning brings: some Twitter.com enabled SPDY goodness in my firefox nightly! (below)

spdy is currently enabled in firefox nightly and you can turn it on in FF 11 and FF 12 through network.http.spdy.enabled in about:config

There is not yet any spdy support for the images on the Akamai CDN that twitter uses, and that's obviously a big part of performance. But still real deployed users of this are Twitter, Google Web, Firefox, Chrome, Silk, node etc.. this really has momentum because it solves the right problems.

Big pieces still left are a popular CDN, open standardization, a http<>spdy gateway like nginx, a stable big standalone server like apache, and support in a load balancing appliance like F5 or citrix. And the wind is blowing the right way on all of those things. This is happening very fast.

https://twitter.com/account/available_features

GET /account/available_features HTTP/1.1
Host: twitter.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:13.0) Gecko/20120308 Firefox/13.0a1
[..]
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
Referer: https://twitter.com/
[..]

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, pre-check=0, post-check=0
Content-Length: 3929
Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=utf-8
Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:20:56 GMT
Etag: "8f2ef94f3149553a2c68e98a8df04425"
Expires: Tue, 31 Mar 1981 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:20:56 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Server: tfe
[..]
x-revision: DEV
x-runtime: 0.01763
[..]
x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block
X-Firefox-Spdy: 1