User:Guaka/Frontend performance

MediaWiki (1.16 and earlier) could be considerably improved in terms of frontend performance.

This would lead to a nicer user experience on tons of wikis (including Wikipedia).

Tools:

• YSlow is a great Firefox/Firebug extension to see what can be improved.
• Google's online Pagespeed tool is also great.

Many things will be fixed by ResourceLoader, which is available in MediaWiki version 1.17 and later and does:

• Minification
• Aggregation
• Loading
• Dependancy solving
• Caching
• Data URLs in stylesheets
• RTL/LTR flip
• Set proper http headers

Does it do?

• CSS embedding of images? like http://drupal.org/project/css_emimage

Yes it does. Max Semenik 04:12, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

There are still a couple of other things to set up in the server.

Server configuration

Apache

• FileETag None
• Expires headers
• Gzip

Try adding this to .htaccess, it will work best if mod_expires is enabled:

#Header unset ETag
FileETag None

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
            ExpiresDefault "access plus 10 years"
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|cur|pdf|flv|jpe?g|JPG|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
   ExpiresActive On
   ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
</FilesMatch>

</IfModule>