Wednesday, November 03, 2010 at 9:00 AM
Webmaster Level: AllLast year, as part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, we introduced Page Speed, a tool that gives developers suggestions to speed up web pages. It’s usually pretty straightforward for developers and webmasters to implement these suggestions by updating their web server configuration, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images. But we thought we could make it even easier -- ideally these optimizations should happen with minimal developer and webmaster effort.
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.
Comparison of the AdSense blog site with and without mod_pagespeed
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.
"Go Daddy is continually looking for ways to provide our customers the best user experience possible. That's the reason we partnered with Google on the 'Make the Web Faster' initiative. Go Daddy engineers are seeing a dramatic decrease in load times of customers' websites using mod_pagespeed and other technologies provided. We hope to provide the technology to our customers soon - not only for their benefit, but for their website visitors as well.”We’re also working with Cotendo to integrate the core engine of mod_pagespeed as part of their Content Delivery Network (CDN) service.
mod_pagespeed integrates as a module for the Apache HTTP Server, and we’ve released it as open-source for Apache for many Linux distributions. Download mod_pagespeed for your platform and let us know what you think on the project’s mailing list. We hope to work with the hosting, developer and webmaster community to improve mod_pagespeed and make the web faster.
55 comments:
This is very impressive. It would be nice if you directly linked to the mod_pagespeed filters or included a quick overview of them in the post. I'll have to delve a little deeper...
As a time clock software publisher, a simplified way to optimize the user experience on our web site is amazingly helpful.
What can I do to encourage our ISP (Westhost) to sign on for their users?
Small typo in the docs
ModPagepeedDomain http://my_site.com
ModPagepeedDomain http://cdn.my_site.com
:)
now write about nginx and lightpd =)
So would this be good for a site getting millions of visitors, or should those modifications be made manually in that case?
Where does this mod go from being useful to a burden in terms of visitors per day, if ever?
amazing! thanks
Great post. As one of the inventors of mod_gzip (which makes your content load faster) anything you can do to save users time on the Internet makes sense.
We've now taken mod_gzip and turned it into Mod_Mobile. It's far more powerful and allows you to send real time device context (Who, What and Where) directly to the server as part of the page request.
So what's the fastest way to deliver a web page? Simple, know ahead of time, exactly what the connecting device is capable of supporting, know who the user is and what their preferences are, and also their real time location.
The solution is architected so that it installs into any web server with nothing more than a single line in a config file.
Here's something else we've also added - it's called DTS or Dynamic Tag Substitution. Normally you have to send a lot of JavaScript to a mobile phone to determine what it's capable of doing and also to get real time device information. Well what if you didn't have to do that? You could save 10's of thousands of bytes of JS.
DTS uses the span tag to request device information. The browser grabs the data, and then rewrites the page in real time with the required information.
Result - you can take a 100k's worth of JS and do the whole thing in less than 6k.
All of the above runs nicely inside the Android Mobile browser
Cheers,
Peter Cranstone
5o9 Inc.
Very Exciting! I'm moving my main site to a VPS so I can get this installed but it would be great to get added to HostGator for some other sites I host. I'm sure that would extend your reach.
Great! Now to convince our hosting partners to get it running.
this is certainly very exciting.. just one quick question.. is it good for a production site? are there any known bugs or issues which we should first make ourselves aware off before letting it run or monitor after?
anyway, kudos to Google on continuously trying to improve the web.. great job guys!
Can it do anything like what Accelo-Web does to lower round trips?
What about the 30% of the web that runs on IIS, surely this is an easy port?
Great. Thanks for the heads up. Does this mean though that if my site is already with GoDaddy that I don't have to do anything, this will be auto updated? Please confirm. Thanks.
Interesante, sobre todo para servidores que son utilizados para puro CMS , genial
I just installed the module on my machine that serves three websites. One is an OsCommerce shop and the speedup is impressing 44% with a 73% boost for the image load time and 43% for the scripts.
The other two sites are Wordpress blogs, one of them being served 1% faster whereas the other one is even 3% slower than before.
I got the load times from the according developer tool in Chrome and I did an average over 5 requests. Before every request, I cleared the browser cache to eliminate local caching effects.
So it seems the result is very mixed? One of the results is - Wow!!!!! But at least it didn't noticably harm the two other ones, so I'll definitely keep the plugin. However, I'd be interested in more documentation and hints in which cases the plugin will perform best.
Looking forward to testing it. Does do any compression (i.e gzip). If so, will there be a need for those? What about cache control?
Mynitor
Now not only the webserver will do the job of generating the html, but parsing it everytime to "optimze it".
If we are talking about dynamic code that can change anytime. This means it needs to run for every html request. Adding overhead, slowing the process, increasing the needs of hardware.
It seems a fair trade-off, electricity and hardware are things you can get giving more money. Developer power to do this optimizations when they should be done (sprites, minimization, etc), it isn't easy to find.
At Gridspy, we serve our dynamic content from django running through nginx. It is a real pity that we cannot use mod_pagespeed with our setup.
This makes me seriously consider switching back to Apache.
Very interesting. What do you mean by "Making changes to the pages built by the Content Management Systems (CMS) with no need to make changes to the CMS itself"? Are we talking about headers or the ability to cache certain html pieces of code?
Thanks!
Very good news im wondering when ll be available for cpanel hosting.
Sam
Great news.
Mod_speed - Let me test it.
this is some great tools
totally gonna try it
can run at openBSD?
thanks
i will try it in the next days. Great work, thank you.
Sonds interesting, but does this module sending informations to Google?
Nice, but it seems to have optimized my spry menubar created in DW into a bulleted list, so I had to turn it back off until I figure out why.
Is something like this going to be available on App Engine?
nice idea. I've found that this mangles SugarCRMs javascripts so at least for now I won't be using it at least not on my sugarCRM server
Good start :)
I did try it with on my site with Liferay. I did blog the results. Anyway I had to disable it :(
For the moment from the first test we have done, it is not working with virtual hosts. You must enable it per server, not per virtual host. Hope this will be supported in the future.
@LeHHel: When you say not working with VirtualHost but one has to enable per server, does it mean that I can enable it on a server and then it will be enabled for all virtual hosts?
Thanks - This is amazing.
Hello
is it support on directadmin control panel?
Glad to see.. My GoDaddy sites can definitely use this. I was researching how to use this, but your already working with my host :)
I've summed up some quick concerns of mine in a post here
Key point is that it might distract developers from doing quality job - optimization is almost always a custom step, it can be helped by tools but never replaced.
@twit: mod_pagespeed implements some of the round trip reduction techniques that AcceloWeb does, but not all of them and none of the resource prioritization techniques.
For sites not running on Apache, the next release of the Strangeloop Site Optimizer will integrate mod_pagespeed and can be implemented in any server environment. The features in the Google module are just one part of the larger site acceleration feature set that Site Optimizer offers.
You can read more here:
http://www.strangeloopnetworks.com/news/releases/strangeloop-to-embrace-google-s-new-open-source-technology-in-next-release-of-site-optimizer/
That is interesting. Any efforts being made with BlueHost too to implement these changes?
www.mohanbn.com
It does not work
I asked my hosting company to install it they said :
"PAgespeed does not work on the server with the current apache, we upgraded to the newest apache but it still didnt work (it is a beta product) the 64bit version does not seem to properly work. we reverted back to the old apache."
Good start :)
Thanks for this valuable information, I think page loading speed will get a REALLY IMPORTANT factor. Think about the impending explosion of mobile web requests by smart phones. If speed is not acceptable, people won't visit the site again => drop rankings sooner or later.
At JoomlArt.com we are testing the new google pagespeed module for Apache and found out that our site is already very well optimized and this module is not helping much for optimized sites.
Use it if you don't know how to get your code optimized, leave it and avoid any hassle if you follow all the optimization best practices.
Will this work with Litespeed servers?
Anybody out there care to do a "mod_pagespeed for Dummies" tutorial? I'm struggling with the installation.
@andywozhere
Go to Page Speed Mod for Joomla & Drupal there you can find a post about an experiment with Google mod_pagespeed. Place your question there and the geeks will help
Great initiative to make loading of sites faster.
Bit confused here though. Is this the first such package for Linux based sites? This type of thing has been available for asp.net based sites for a while, such as
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/CombineAndMinify.aspx
A lot of CMS's can perform these functions without needing an Apache module (especially with the Apache 2.2 requirement).
If you're running Wordpress check out W3 Total Cache. For Drupal take a look at Boost.
I use it and i got very impressive results.
For simple sites this pagespeed stuff may be OK, but it appears to cause problems with sites that are running off sophisticated code and databases. I am therefore not surprised that Google is using GoDaddy as the guineapig - GoDaddy is known to run their systems at levels that suit only the most rudimentary platforms.
This is very much in the BETA phase of testing. Webhosts who unleash this on their clients' live websites are acting very irresponsibly.
Just becuase Google is involved in the development of this MOD, does not mean it's flawless. On the contrary, I would say that BECAUSE Google is behind it is the main reason why web hosts should move with caution.
Unfortunately this mod is still very much beta. I tried it on my server, crashed the server. So I spent a few hours trying to recover the server, eventually got it back, did some tweaking and regardless of my changes it caused massive load on the server.
It's a great project, but unfortunately you should use it at your own risk at this stage.
this is very great and impressive stuff , thank u very much
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