1. Converting images to data-urls is hard to do by hand because not all browsers support data-urls. In other cases the decision about whether that conversion is a win or not is dependent on the browser, the connection speed, and other dynamic aspects. These are very hard to change statically.

2. You raise a concern that javascript minification should not be done in the server. The way you phrased it implies that the minification must take place every time the page is served. This is not the case. mod_pagespeed caches the optimized versions of resources that it creates. As long as the origin javascript is not updated, mod_pagespeed will not need to recompute the optimization; it will serve the resources from cache.

However, you make a very good point that the best practices we’ve automated with mod_pagespeed are not optimized for a particular site. We recommend using http://webpagetest.org to measure the site speed with and without mod_pagespeed, and to help you tune the mod_pagespeed options. Be sure to run large numbers of iterations, both first & repeat view, because many sites exhibit a wide variance in performance. 10 is the maximum number you can do at once.

Also see Page Speed online, http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/, which gives you very rapid feedback as to what can be improved on your site. Many of the recommendations it offers are done automatically by mod_pagespeed, some must still be done manually.

@Alex there is all kinds of cool stuff in procfs, I should write a post about the best bits.

Before sending the ‘b’ it is always worth sending ‘s’, ‘u’ and ‘s’ again – force a sync, remount all FS’s r/o and then sync again.

Best of luck with resurrecting the box!

Mujtaba Hussain

p.s. You too, my friend, are on facebook, so don’t rush to criticise it