I've just enabled the SPDY module on nginx, as explanained on the SPDY module site. I expected a speed enhacement on my site, but I haven't noticed it.
Using Firefox 25 and Firebug, I tried to take a look at the site loading to try to find out what's going on. This is what I got:
Without SPDY:
With SPDY:
The total page load is the same, but without SPDY all the resources seem to be requested and served sequentially, and with SPDY all at the same time.
But with SPDY there's that emptiness just there, where the navigator seems to be doing nothing. I got similar results on another SPDY-enabled websites.
The Wikipedia says that
The goal of SPDY is to reduce web page load time. This is achieved by prioritizing and multiplexing the transfer of web page subresources so that only one connection per client is required
What happens? Is that normal? If the transfer is multiplexed shouldn't the resources be fetched faster?
Please notice that on subsequent requests the pageload was way better for SPDY, but there's still that emptiness doing apparently nothing.
I've deleted the cache between every request, jsut in case.