Slashdot (and the rest of the web) 2X faster?!

grmoc writes: As part of the "Let's make the web faster" initiative, we (a few engineers (including me!) at Google, and hopefully people all across the community soon!) are experimenting with alternative protocols to help reduce the latency of web pages. One of these experiments is SPDY (pronounced "SPeeDY"), an application-layer protocol (essentially a shim between HTTP and the bits on the wire) for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimal latency. In addition to a rough specification for the protocol, we have hacked SPDY into the Google Chrome browser (because its what we're familiar with) and a simple server testbed. Using these hacked up bits, we compared the performance of many of the top 25 and top 300 websites over both HTTP and SPDY, and have observed those pages load, on average, about twice as fast using SPDY.. Thats not bad!

We hope to engage the open source community to contribute ideas, feedback, code (we've open sourced the protocol, etc!), and test results!