Google Releases mod_pagespeed for Apache
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com
Today we’re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) — in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.
Here are a few simple optimizations that are a pain to do manually, but that mod_pagespeed excels at:
• Making changes to the pages built by the Content Management Systems (CMS) with no need to make changes to the CMS itself,
• Recompressing an image when its HTML context changes to serve only the bytes required (typically tedious to optimize manually), and
• Extending the cache lifetime of the logo and images of your website to a year, while still allowing you to update these at any time.