So I finally got a chance to try mod_pagespeed on this server. I particularly wanted to know if it behaved well with WP Super Cache as I’d read reports that it causes problems.
Unfortunately those problems are real but I’ve been told that a new release will be out shortly to address a few bugs so perhaps this will help.
If you’d like to try mod_pagespeed make sure you disable compression in WP Super Cache and clear the cache first. Even though the docs state that the module always generates uncompressed HTML it appears to do the opposite. In fact, it tries to load mod_deflate:
# more pagespeed.load
LoadModule pagespeed_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_pagespeed.so
# Only attempt to load mod_deflate if it hasn’t been loaded already.
<IfModule !mod_deflate.c>
LoadModule deflate_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_deflate.so
</IfModule>
When things were working, supercached files were processed by mod_pagespeed correctly, I noticed inline Javascript was modified to remove whitespace and I presume other changes were made too but I already minify things and have static files off on another domain so perhaps the changes made on my pages are less minimal.
The changes made by mod_pagespeed, like minifying inline Javascript, are not cached by WP Super Cache so your server has to make these changes each time a page is served. I know that mod_deflate does not cache the gzipped page content, but zips up the page each time it’s served. Mod_pagespeed does however provide a caching mechanism so there’s a good chance those changes are cached there. I haven’t looked at the code so I don’t know.
I did have problems with dynamic pages. A simple phpinfo() refused to load quite often, and backend requests sometimes became stuck. Load on the server sky rocketed occasionally, usually when the module cache directory was emptied.
For now I’ve turned mod_pagespeed off but that might change as this is a young project and maturing fast! I’ll update this post whenever this happens.
