My title pretty much says it all. I have been looking at mod_pagespeed and it somehow impresses me as being very little more than a way to offload the work of optimization to the server instead of the developer.
There may be some advantages to doing this such as reducing developer time etc so I’m not suggesting that it is all bad. But it also does strike me as a bit of a script kiddie way to do things. Rather than learn about all those performance techniques, hey! just let the server do it!
Is mod_pagespeed something that would be good to implement on my production web application or would I be better off doing the optimization “by hand”?
It seems to me that it could empower the server admin to centrally optimize content created by a large set of developers. Also, it could be a good way of baking in some well-tested (by Google) best practices that might be costly to develop on your own.