Google has brought themselves to the forefront of web technology through sheer weight of contribution by being part of the search revolution, but also through their continual development for the open source community. This month they’re working not only on the browser market to get web pages to flow faster to viewers, but on the other side of the equation as well with the release of mod_pagespeed for Apache HTTP servers.

So today, we’re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) — in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.

mod_pagespeed (download it here) is a module that can be compiled or linked into an Apache web server by administrators. This is a big deal for anyone who administers a web page and can take advantage of this technology. As the quote states, it’s simply an on-the-fly implementation of a few time-consuming tweaks that take advantage of numerous time-saving techniques that Google has already suggested to web server administrators.

The mod is open-source and has been released for a multitude of Linux distributions.

This could be as big news for customers—the very vitality of the web—as it means that a multitude of web pages which run Apache HTTP Server can take advantage of these tweaks just by installing a module, which will greatly speed their browsing experience. (I know I could have used something similar to this at my last web page administration job.)

According to Google, they’re working hand-in-hand with GoDaddy—who boast 8.5 million web customers—a factor which will springboard adoption of mod_pagespeed from newly developed from the lab into enterprise-level use.