mod_spdy with reverse proxy

[Batista R. Harahap]

Hi everybody,

Thanks for a great preview into the future with SPDY!

I'm Tista and I'm from Indonesia. I have a server with ~2000 visits/
day to test on mod_spdy. Currently, it's configure with apache as the
backend and nginx as reverse proxy.

I haven't tried to compile, I have just a few things to ask before
doing so. Will mod_spdy be usable behind a reverse proxy?

My second question would be, since SPDY needs SSL to be enabled, when
it's on a reverse proxy environment like mine, if all the connections
are proxied back and forth still with SSL, will this work?

Apologies for crashing in with questions, very excited with what
mod_spdy have to offer, it will drastically improve concurrency :)
Thank you beforehand.


Best,
Tista

[Bryan McQuade]

Hi. Thanks for asking.

Unfortunately SPDY needs to be running on the web server where the TCP
connection from your users is terminated. In cases where you have an
proxy like nginx running in front of Apache, you would want to be
running SPDY in nginx. I believe there is support for SPDY in nginx
coming but i don't know the specifics.

You could also run nginx as a TCP proxy on port 443 to your Apache
instance and then run mod_spdy in Apache, but you would not get any
caching, etc benefits from nginx on port 443 in that case. There seems
to be an nginx TCP proxy module available:
https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_tcp_proxy_module but I am not at
all familiar with it.

Hope that helps!
-Bryan