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

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

Apache

 * FileETag None
 * Expires headers
 * Gzip

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

FileETag None
 * 1) Header unset ETag

           ExpiresDefault "access plus 10 years"  ExpiresActive On  ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year" 

