Speeding Up Your Site With SPDY and Nginx

Published: Estimated Reading Time: ~1 minute

Prerequisites:

  • nginx >= 1.3.15

By reading this you acknowledge that you:

  • are currently using Nginx as your web sever
  • have SSL enabled on your site

The first step is to compile Nginx with SPDY support, at the time of writing this can be done with the –with-http_spdy_module argument. But if your using Ubuntu (which I recommend) and are on the release 10.04 or higher, you can install it easily with my installable packages for Nginx.

After adding my PPA, you can run the following to install Nginx:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get -y install nginx nginx-common nginx-full

Those commands will install nginx with the SPDY patch applied, and with many other modules.

To enable SPDY in a nginx configuration, just add the “spdy” and the “ssl” parameters to the listen directive:

server {
    listen 443 ssl spdy;
    server_name example.com;
...
}