By Matthew Steele, PageSpeed Insights Team

Just over two years ago, we launched mod_spdy, a plugin for the popular Apache Web Server that adds support for the SPDY protocol. At the time, our goal was both to speed up the web and help fuel the growth and adoption of SPDY by making it easy for Apache 2.2 users to install and enable SPDY on their sites. Today, SPDY is now widely adopted, officially supported by several web servers and many popular sites, and the IETF is using it as the basis for the upcoming HTTP/2.0 protocol. The time seems right for mod_spdy to cease being a third-party add-on, and to instead become a core part of Apache httpd.

We’re pleased to announce that Google has formally donated mod_spdy’s code to the Apache Software Foundation, and it is now a part of the Apache httpd codebase.

“The intent is to work on making it fully part of [Apache] 2.4 and, of course, a core part of 2.6/3.0” - Jim Jagielski, co-founder of the ASF.

Being a part of Apache core will make SPDY support even more widely available for Apache httpd users, and pave the way for HTTP/2.0. It will also further improve that support over the original version of mod_spdy by better integrating SPDY and HTTP/2.0’s multiplexing features with the core part of the server.

We’re grateful for all the adoption and feedback we’ve gotten from mod_spdy users over the past two years, and we’re very excited to see the Apache Software Foundation take it from here!

Matthew Steele is a Software Engineer on the Google PageSpeed Insights Team in Cambridge, MA. He and his team focus on developing tools to help site owners make their sites faster and more usable.

Posted by Louis Gray, Googler

Last year, as part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, we introduced Page Speed, a tool that gives developers suggestions to speed up web pages. It’s usually pretty straightforward for developers and webmasters to implement these suggestions by updating their web server configuration, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images. But we thought we could make it even easier -- ideally these optimizations should happen with minimal developer and webmaster effort.

So today, we’re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) -- in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.

(Video comparison of the AdSense blog site with and without mod_pagespeed)

Here are a few simple optimizations that are a pain to do manually, but that mod_pagespeed excels at:

• Making changes to the pages built by the Content Management Systems (CMS) with no need to make changes to the CMS itself,
• Recompressing an image when its HTML context changes to serve only the bytes required (typically tedious to optimize manually), and
• Extending the cache lifetime of the logo and images of your website to a year, while still allowing you to update these at any time.

We’re working with Go Daddy to get mod_pagespeed running for many of its 8.5 million customers. Warren Adelman, President and COO of Go Daddy, says:

"Go Daddy is continually looking for ways to provide our customers the best user experience possible. That's the reason we partnered with Google on the 'Make the Web Faster' initiative. Go Daddy engineers are seeing a dramatic decrease in load times of customers' websites using mod_pagespeed and other technologies provided. We hope to provide the technology to our customers soon - not only for their benefit, but for their website visitors as well.”

We’re also working with Cotendo to integrate the core engine of mod_pagespeed as part of their Content Delivery Network (CDN) service.

mod_pagespeed integrates as a module for the Apache HTTP Server, and we’ve released it as open-source for Apache for many Linux distributions. Download mod_pagespeed for your platform and let us know what you think on the project’s mailing list. We hope to work with the hosting, developer and webmaster community to improve mod_pagespeed and make the web faster.

By Richard Rabbat, ‘Make the Web Faster’ initiative

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

When I read an email sent to an Apache Software Foundation mailing list suggesting an open source project for OpenSocial, I wasn't surprised to see it come from Brian McCallister, a prolific open source developer that I met years ago in a former life.

Brian McCallister now works at Ning, the social network outsourcer, and sat down to talk to me about topics revolving around Ning, OpenSocial, and Apache Shindig.

What will you learn from this chat?

• What Ning is all about
• Why Ning and Brian think about OpenSocial, and why developers should be interested
• The parts and pieces of OpenSocial from the standpoint of a developer, and a third party container
• How Brian thinks that we will get more than just "Write one, learn everywhere"
• What Apache Shindig is all about
• How Shindig allows you to do simple local development, which changes the game with respect to your development lifecycle

Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian "Fitz" Fitzpatrick, two of the engineers behind our project hosting service, will be joining us this week to discuss "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)." Based on their experiences with the Apache, Subversion and other open source projects, Ben and Fitz will cover effective ways of dealing with difficult people who join your community.

Please feel free to join us for the presentation this Thursday, January 25th at our Corporate Headquarters in Mountain View. Doors will open at 6:30 PM and refreshments will be served. Ben and Fitz will begin speaking at 7:00 PM. Please plan to sign in at Building 41 reception when you arrive.

We hope to see you there!