Thoughts on GZIP, Google Page Speed or PHP XCache?

Tim,

I’d definitely use gzip compression via Apache/htaccess. However I’ve seen problems crop up when using ExpressionEngine’s gzip compression and some third-party addons—I’m thinking of Structure, but there may be others. In general, I’d give it a shot and then run through the site and make sure nothing is broken.

Google’s Page Speed tool—and I think you’re mainly talking about mod_pagespeed, the Apache module version—can cause issues because of how aggressive it is. It’ll remove lines of CSS and in general change things around more than you might expect. Granted, it does speed things up considerably. Like with the gzip compression you’ll want to test this one out very thoroughly and preferably with no other changes. That way if anything strange pops up, it can only be mod_pagespeed.

I’ve never used XCache, but it looks very similar to something I use on almost every project: APC. I’d say enable this and just take a look every now and again to see if everything’s working, but these opcode caches tend to be pretty reliable.

Wes