YSlow & Improving Speed
Yahoo! came out with a FireBug addon - YSlow, that takes a look at your web page and offers a score on performance. Most of the recommendations are easy enough to follow, below are 3 that take some Apache httpd.conf hacking to get working:
1) Configure ETags
Add this to your httpd.conf
FileETag MTime Size
2) Turn on Expiration Headers
# Turn on Expires and set default to 0
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A7200
# Set up caching on media files for 1 year
<FilesMatch “\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$”>
ExpiresDefault A29030400
</FilesMatch>
# Set up caching on media files for 1 week
<FilesMatch “\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$”>
ExpiresDefault A604800
</FilesMatch>
# Set up 24 Hour caching on commonly updated files
<FilesMatch “\.(xml|txt|html|php|js|css)$”>
ExpiresDefault A86400
</FilesMatch>
3) Add Gzip compression
Install mod_gzip for Apache, add this to your httpd.conf to configure mod_gzip to handle files/settings
<IfModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_can_negotiate Yes
mod_gzip_static_suffix .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gz
mod_gzip_update_static No
mod_gzip_command_version ‘/mod_gzip_status’
mod_gzip_keep_workfiles No
mod_gzip_minimum_file_size 512
mod_gzip_maximum_file_size 1048576
mod_gzip_maximum_inmem_size 60000
mod_gzip_min_http 1000
mod_gzip_handle_methods GET POST
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^httpd/unix-directory$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.shtml$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.html$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/javascript$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.js$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.css$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-httpd-php$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.php$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
# DO NOT WASTE TIME COMPRESSING IMAGES
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.$
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader Content-Type:image/*
</IfModule>
That’s it, those 3 changes improved my score from F (60) to a respectable B (81).
Written by Tim on August 16th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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