mod_pagespeed

I’ve seen only a single post regarding this so I’ll assume awareness of this project isn’t evry high. I recently stumbled upon mod_pagespeed, which is a module for the Apach Webserver that pretty much does everything to comply to the hints by Google’s Page Speed tests.

I just took a small glance at it, but the overall impression is pretty good. I pushed two of my yii-based projects through it and haven’t encountered any problems so far. You shouldn’t set this up on your dev-machines, though. mod_pagespeed’s cache will last for a year by default ;D

It’s been available for some time on Dreamhost as a simple checkbox in cpanel :). I especially like improved caching with file name rewrites and double TTL local and remote.

So, looks like v1.0 has been released.

A version for nginx has been released today. I can’t make up to which versions of nginx this module is compatible and it doesn’t seem to come as an rpm from the mod_pagespeed repo. I see some hints it might work with versions as early as v0.8.x … Anybody tried that yet?

edit: I just realized nginx modules do not really come as .so’s, which is significantly reducing the chances to ever see a packaged binary version of this module.

Nginx doesn’t support dynamic module loading.

There’s a Chinese nginx fork, Tengine http://tengine.taobao.org which supports dynamic module loading.

For what it matters, we are using mod_pagespeed with Yii on www.softworld.com and it works perfect for us.

It takes a while till you get the right directives, especially if there’s a CDN involved like in the above example, but when you do know how it works, it’s just another tool you wish you have had for a while now (just like apc or fileinfo for php).

Overall, a great module.

Well, thanks. That’s essentially been what I wanted to express by saying nginx’ modules wouldn’t come as .so’s ;)