Reducing HTTP latency with SPDY

Nope :-) The problem with delayed pipelined connections is that the requests are still dealt with one at a time, just without the connection closing in between them. This means a delay of 200ms getting the first request flushed to the client means a 200ms delay in beginning to process the second request. But, with a multiplexed connection, the second request can have been sent before the network delay occurs, and so the server can begin dealing with that request and queueing the packets for sending straight away... it may even be able to get them out the door and to the client, which means that as soon as the client gets the retransmitted packet that got lost, it can piece them all together and pass it into the applications memory, without having to spend as much time waiting for the packets that would have followed it otherwise. Remember that buffers may be in-order at both ends, but that doesn't mean that transmission must be also :-)