Install Google mod_pagespeed for Apache HTTP

Website network performance is usually a very complicated process. Over the years, I’ve outlined many development techniques that can be used toward this goal. I’d heard about mod_pagespeed for some time, but never had the opportunity to experiment with it until recently. My first impression is that it is a VERY EASY means to gain performance improvements without reworking your existing website to implement techniques for establishing far-future expires, cache-busting, minification and static file merging.

Out of the box, most common techniques are automatically applied to your assets and a local server cache is created to utilize them.

Default installation is trivial:

  1. Download the latest version for your server architecture:

    wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux/direct/mod-pagespeed-stable_current_amd64.deb

    OR

    wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux/direct/mod-pagespeed-stable_current_i386.deb

  2. sudo dpkg -i mod-pagespeed-*.deb

  3. sudo apt-get -f install
    (if required)

  4. sudo service apache2 restart

NOTE: Using tools like Firebug will enable you to see an HTTP Header indicating the version being used for your requests.

If you need to modify configuration from the default:

sudo vi /etc/apache2/mods-available/pagespeed.conf

For VirtualDomains, you can selectively enable and disable PageSpeed and many of it’s settings in your appropriate configuration files with:

<IfModule pagespeed_module>
ModPagespeed on
</IfModule>

NOTE: Appending ?ModPagespeed=off to your URL will disable functions for that request.

REFERENCES:

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