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I have a ruby on rails website that is hosted on unicorn webserver behind a nginx reverse proxy. I want to evaluate if using spdy will enhance my performance under this setup.

Specifically, I need the directions on the following:

  1. does using reverse proxy nullify the gains from using spdy?
  2. what performance/load testing tool can i use to evaluate gains from using spdy?
  3. is there a way to force nginx to only talk spdy?

In regards to the second question i found that neoload and loadrunner 12 does support spdy.

With neoload i'm having trouble getting it to recognize that my server is using spdy despite chrome://net-internals/#spdy and http://spdycheck.org/ telling me that it IS using spdy (I'm using spdy 3.1, when i used spdy 2 neoload did recognized it).

neoload

crhome://net-internals

With loadrunner i don't have yet found a way to be sure that it is testing spdy. I'm using the spdy_url function however the documentation does not tell me if spdy_url assures me that spdy is being used underneath. One way to be sure would be to configure nginx to only talk spdy (third question).

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here is my suggestions on your questions.

  1. actually it is not easy to evaluate spdy performance gain. It depends on what your website style. Does it include a lot small objects or just a few large images? For a more academic answer you can refer here : "How speedy is SPDY?"

  2. if your website is public now, you can use WPT : http://www.webpagetest.org by enabling or disabling the SPDY you can find the performance gain.

  3. I think both nginx and mod_spdy will speak plain HTTPS if the client unable to speak SPDY. If you wanna an only-SPDY HTTPD, you can try spdylay, which provide a spdy proxy tool -- shrpx

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  • I had initially discarded webpagetest.org because it is too simple. What i needed was a more sophisticated tool where i could define a navigation path for users( signing in, navigating to links, clicking some stuff and signing out, for instance). In the end, i used selenium because it used the browser (which makes it easy to check if spdy is being used) and because with it i had enough flexibility to define the navigation path that i wanted. Questions 1 and 3 remains unanswered (my client decided not to use spdy anyway so i didn't needed to persue those answers further).
    – zango123
    Jul 30, 2014 at 17:42

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