Web performance, delivered.

Two years ago we released the Page Speed browser extension and earlier this year the Page Speed Online API to provide developers with specific suggestions to make their web pages faster. Last year we released mod_pagespeed, an Apache module, to automatically rewrite web pages. To further simplify the life of webmasters and to avoid the hassles of installation, today we are releasing the latest addition to the Page Speed family: Page Speed Service.

Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.

In our testing we have seen speed improvements of 25% to 60% on several sites. But we know you care most about the numbers for your site, so check out how much Page Speed Service can speed up your site. If you’re encouraged by the results, please sign up. If not, be sure to check back later. We are diligently working on adding more improvements to the service.

At this time, Page Speed Service is being offered to a limited set of webmasters free of charge. Pricing will be competitive and details will be made available later. You can request access to the service by filling out this web form.

Googlers Down Under


Despite the recent flooding in Brisbane, Australia, linux.conf.au (lca) will proceed from January 24th to 29th, and Googlers from across the company will be there. LCA is a community-run technical conference for free and open source software enthusiasts, featuring but not limited to Linux. In addition to the many Googlers who will be attending, several Googlers will also be presenting at the conference.

The conference starts on Monday the 24th with a day of miniconfs, and Nóirín Shirley from Google’s Zurich office will be presenting “Open Source: Saving the World” as part of the Haecksen track.

Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf will start the day on Tuesday the 25th with his keynote presentation, and later that morning he will present “In Search of Transmission Capacity – a Multicore Dilemma.” On Tuesday afternoon, Google Summer of Code Administrator Carol Smith will give a “Google Summer of Code Update” at the FOSS in Research and Student Innovation Miniconf.

On Wednesday January 26th, Google staff engineer and Linux kernel committer Ted Ts’o will explain “Making file systems scale: A case study using ext4.”

Andrew Gerrand and Nigel Tao of the Go team will give attendees “A Tour of Go” on Thursday the 27th, and Nóirín will present “Baby Steps into Open Source – Incubation and Mentoring at Apache,” which is based on her experience at the Apache Software Foundation.

On Friday the 28th, Carol will present her talk, “The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Project Managers” in the morning. A little later in the day, Daniel Bentley and Daniel Nadasi of the open source and Geo teams respectively will talk about “Opening a Closed World,” followed by Marc MERLIN, who works on infrastructure at Google. Marc will discuss “Saving Money with Misterhouse: Running Your Lights and HVAC System. Scaring your cat off the kitchen counter is just a bonus :)”

LCA always closes with Open Day, a free day-long event where the general public can leearn about open source, open data – all things “open”. The Open Day is on Saturday the 29th, and Cat Allman of the Open Source Programs Office will be presenting her talk, “What is Open Source?” there.

Come learn more about the latest happenings in open source, and join us in showing support for Brisbane’s recovery. We hope to see you there!

Announcing apache-extras.org

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has had a profound influence on everything I’ve worked on over the last decade, and a new partnership with them is a great opportunity for saying “thanks” and giving back. Today we’re announcing the launch of apache-extras.org. Much like our launch of eclipselabs.org earlier this year, we’re creating a separate instance of Project Hosting specifically for ASF-related projects to congregate around.

Back in 2000, when the Subversion project was in its nascent stages, we first few committers were all made members of the APR (Apache Portable Runtime) project; Subversion and Apache HTTPD shared this common portability layer. Over the following years, I was pulled ever closer to the workings of the ASF — attending Apachecon conventions and meeting members from other ASF projects. And because the Subversion project started out with a significant number of developers from the Apache community, its own processes came to mimic the same classic consensus-driven culture that the ASF champions.

Years after that, Google Code’s Project Hosting service was also started by ASF members working at Google. So it’s not surprise that those of us who still work on the product share the ASF’s core philosophy: that open source projects aren’t just buckets of code, but are all about people. A codebase without a living, breathing community is a dead project.

So what can we do, as a company, to support open source communities? Providing hosting infrastructure certainly helps, but we can even go a step further. Successful open source software projects are rarely islands of development; larger projects tend to develop ecosystems of related but “unofficial” projects around them. It’s sometimes hard to identify these sub-communities, and so we can help by bolstering their presence: give them a clearer sense of identity and location by inviting them to live under a common banner.

This is why we’re excited to launch apache-extras.org today. By working under a common logo and domain name, we hope these projects can gain more visibility and grow into their own thriving community.

And to the ASF: a great big “thanks” for doing what you do.

[If you already have a project on Google Code and would like to migrate it to the apache-extras instance, you can fill out this request form.]