[ricardobeat]

That test was done by proxying through a third-party. I don't see how that's any more credible than the other results from Google he cites and dismisses at the top. The restriction of having SPDY disabled for third-party domains also taints the results. "It won't make the web faster because not everyone will use it" is a silly argument.

He also dismisses the benefits of having encryption by default on every connection, that itself is worth a 3% slowdown.

[dsl]

He didn't just proxy through a random "third-party," he sent everything via Contendo. If anything that sped the whole thing up unfairly. Contendo had (before Akamai killed them) a killer DSA product that basically sucked a webpage in via the closest Contendo datacenter then transported it over their optimized and compressed backbone to the Contendo datacenter closest to the user.

SPDY hits you a bit harder in setup costs to be able to sling lots of requests back and forth faster. This is great for someone like Google who serves 100% of the on page content themselves. Anyone with advertising, third party content, or using a CDN for delivery might want to do some extensive real world testing before bothering to implement.