Mod-pagespeed Notes

In this guide, I’ll be installing mod_pagespeed on a 64-bit CentOS 5.5
system. The host is example.com.

Installation

Grab the most appropriate RPM
and install it.

rpm -ivh https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux/direct/mod-pagespeed-beta_current_x86_64.rpm

This is the RPM manifest on a 64-bit system:

/etc/cron.daily/mod-pagespeed  
/etc/httpd/conf.d/pagespeed.conf  
/usr/lib64/httpd/modules/mod_pagespeed.so  
/var/www/mod_pagespeed/cache  
/var/www/mod_pagespeed/files

Testing

To check for a proper install, you can do two things:

Checking headers

Let’s use wget:

wget -O - --server-response http://example.com/home/index.php > /dev/null 

Here’s the response:

--2011-01-05 09:01:36--  http://example.com/home/index.php
Resolving example.com... 128.255.22.132
Connecting to example.com|128.255.22.132|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2011 15:01:36 GMT
  Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
  X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.10
  X-Mod-Pagespeed: 0.9.11.5-293
  Vary: Accept-Encoding
  Content-Length: 4657
  Connection: close
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Length: 4657 (4.5K) [text/html]
Saving to: `STDOUT'

100%[========================================>] 4,657       --.-K/s   in 0s      

2011-01-05 09:01:36 (211 MB/s) - `-' saved [4657/4657]

The X-Mod-Pagespeed header should tell you that pagespeed is in
action.

Tweaking Pagespeed

Pagespeed has 18 ‘filters’ with which you can tweak for performance. For
example, I can remove all HTML comments with this filter in
/etc/httpd/conf.d/pagespeed.conf

ModPagespeedEnableFilters remove_comments

To see a “before-and-after”, append ?ModPagespeed=off to any page
served up. This page does a good job of
explaining other filters. You can also check the documentation.

Viewing statistics

The /etc/httpd/conf.d/pagespeed.conf config defines
/mod_pagespeed_statistics as a page where you can take a look at
pagspeed’s statistics.

Sources