Our site slowdown was a real wake-up call on Friday. Jared Ashlock, one of our web developers, spent four years optimizing web server performance at the HTTP level when he worked at Port80 Software. He pointed out over the weekend that we should be using the mod_expires Apache module to set some caching policies for our .css, .js and image files.  We are needlessly getting hit with requests for those types of files when they can be cached on the client side.

He pointed out that we should also use mod_gzip to compress our outbound HTML content. These are server modifications, and so something we can implement now and see immediate performance benefits.

It’s nice having a brainy team!