Saw a post on the Google code blog about an Apache module they’ve developed to “speed up the web”. Supposedly, it’s supposed to improve load times and user experience for web sites hosted on Apache servers. I ran a few tests and did not find that to be the case.

Setup

These tests were run against a test environment for my link tracking service. It’s built on the Symfony framework and is served by an Apache2 installation on a Debian Linux server.

I downloaded and installed the mod_pagespeed module per the installation instructions and ran eleven tests with it on, and another eleven with it off. The full results are below, but for the averages I discarded the highest and lowest numbers from each set. Results were measured across a local network using the Firebug Net Panel.

Results

Average load time in milliseconds using mod_pagespeed: 514.78
Average load time in milliseconds without mod_pagespeed: 381.78

Raw Data (sorted)

with/without
439 346
441 353
446 359
478 365
502 375
518 376
521 385
538 392
588 412
601 419
705 421

Conclusions

I think this speaks for itself. Google and I must be doing things differently – no big surprise there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010 at 2:19 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.