Idea: Using the SPDY protocol to improve Tor performance

Steven J. Murdoch tor+Steven.Murdoch at cl.cam.ac.uk
Fri Feb 5 11:35:45 UTC 2010


On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 11:14:28PM +0100, Carsten Krüger wrote:
> > SPDY is a transport layer for HTTP, and so has no effect on caching.
> 
> Wrong, SPDY didn't now If-Modified-Since_Header and sends all data
> everytime.

SPDY supports all HTTP headers. What web servers do with them varies,
but Apache with SPDY support does the same as it does with normal TCP.

> From the FAQ of SPDY:
> Caching
> Since we're proposing to do almost everything over an encrypted channel, we're making caching either difficult or impossible.
> We've had some discussions about having a non-secure, static-only content channel (where the resources are signed, or cryptographic hashes of the insecure content are sent over a secure link), but have made no headway yet...

They are referring to a transparent proxy, not in-browser caching. In
any case, we wouldn't use SSL because Tor encrypts data anyway.

> > Server push does need to be handled carefully with respect to caching,
> 
> The Server pushes everything

Server push is still experimental, and not implemented as far as I
know.

Steven.

-- 
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/



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