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:
- 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
-
sudo dpkg -i mod-pagespeed-*.deb
-
sudo apt-get -f install
-
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=offto your URL will disable functions for that request.
REFERENCES:
