User:Guaka/Frontend performance

''This was an attempt at creating a guide to frontend performance of MediaWiki. The page was however deleted after a couple of edits. Without warning. Finally it was restored here. But the energy to keep on working on this was gone.''

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.

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" 

