By Matthew Steele and Bryan McQuade,
PageSpeed Insights Team

At Google, we strive to make the whole web fast. Our work in this area includes PageSpeed, Google Chrome, and the SPDY protocol, among other efforts. In December of 2011, to make it easy for you to enable the SPDY (pronounced “SPeeDY”) protocol on your sites, we released an early beta of mod_spdy, an Apache module that adds SPDY support to the Apache HTTPD server. We’ve spent the last few months working with our early adopters to fix bugs and tune performance of the module. Today, we’re launching a version of mod_spdy that we encourage you to try on your web server.

Enabling SPDY for your site improves performance in several ways:

• The server and browser can compress HTTP headers, saving bytes on the network.
• Multiple resource requests can be multiplexed over a single TCP connection, saving connections on the network.
• The browser can request all page resources at once instead of a few at a time, which reduces the number of network round-trips needed between server and client.