[hobohacker]

http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper has data on improvements in lab tests. http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2012/01/making-web-speedier-a... has a blurb where Google announces that they've made search (already highly optimized) faster with SPDY. This is a fascinating result, because this result was obtained after Google Search switched to using HTTPS, which typically makes websites slower, but in Google's case, made it faster because of SPDY. Note that Twitter and Facebook have also adopted SPDY. I'd be rather skeptical that Google, Twitter, and Facebook would all switch to SPDY if there weren't real world benefits.

[powertower]

When you enable SPDY for your average website, you'll get some real world results.

When you talk about Google, or Facebook, or Twitter using it to squeeze out a few extra percentage points out of their latency or bandwidth or load-time - in their very highly specialized and optimized and conditional and resourceful environment, that's about as non real world as it get for the rest of us.

The fact that SPDY adaptation has mostly failed for the rest of the internet, says more about it than any white-paper or lab-result can.

Again, I hope I'm wrong here.

[lstamour]

I can say you're going to be wrong ;-) Lots of sites are adopting it through services like CloudFlare and large shared ISPs will likely turn it on as a feature (or for all users) once the Apache/Nginx pagespeed plugins stabilize and SSL grows cheaper thanks to IPv6 addresses. The main problem is that SPDY adoption basically goes hand-in-hand with SSL adoption, and SSL hasn't taken off though it should. You wouldn't say SSL has failed, would you? ;-)