Chet (@oraclenerd) noted a short outage here earlier. Maybe you saw it too.
If so, apologies.
All for a good cause though, as Rich (@rmanalan) was implementing mod_pagespeed, which is new from Google today as part of their initiative to make the web faster.
So 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.
You may notice a slow first-time load, as everything is cached, but overall, we should be faster now. Try this for your site too.
Google Code Blog: Make your websites run faster, automatically — try mod_pagespeed for Apache
Update: And just like Kaiser Soze, it’s gone. Rich has his reasons.
Another update: Back again.
I disabled it for now. It’s not very consistent. Sometimes it hangs on different pages. Also, it breaks the WP editor.
Ok… it’s back on, but I turned off a few filters… specifically:
ModPagespeedDisableFilters rewrite_javascript,rewrite_images
The rewrite_javascript was breaking the WP editor and the rewrite_images is likely consuming lots of CPU and memory. At the same time, I enabled a few filters that weren’t part of the core:
ModPagespeedEnableFilters remove_quotes,elide_attributes
remove_quotes strips out quotes around attrib values (since it’s not required) and elide_attributes removes attributes that are redundant.