I was introduced to Google’s mod_pagespeed at my current place of employment. I dismissed it at first until I was tasked with adding it to one of our existing web apps that didn’t have it yet. Wow. KeepAlive + mod_pagespeed is fantastic. I know KeepAlive is old but it’s still off by default in Apache’s HTTPd config and, all by itself, it gives you a 3x savings in some cases I’ve tried. That, and mod_pagespeed brings you stuff like auto-bundling certain css and javascript into a single request, minifying javascript files and inline javascript, compressing images, generating optimized/rescaled images based on IMG tag width/height, etc. and it goes on. It’s a brilliant “best of breed” (forgive me for saying that!) compilation of all the best web performance techniques. Here’s how to install it…