Amongst the main points that Google had identified as being the first order of business of its Faster Web initiative was to update the aging web protocols. Many projects around the world were already underway as the new focus of web development was shifting from offering more and more features to users, even if these were slow, to offering features that were not incompatible with web performance. Google's initiative helped to change web development priorities and, thus, allowed existing projects to come to light and new projects to be created.
In this chapter, we will cover a few projects that went along with Google's new initiative for the web. Thus, we will cover the following points:
- MOD_SPDY and HTTP/2
- PHP-FPM and OPCache
- ESI and Varnish Cache
- Client-side caching
- Other Faster Web tools
