Google launches page speed optimising to improve web performance

Google today launched a new content delivery network (CDN) called Page Speed Service, which, like any other such service provides improved web performance by creating cached replicas of a site at locations distributed around the globe. The site can then be accessed through  a high-speed, low-latency local server, rather than having to use the authoritative master server.

But the service does not stop at naïve caching, rather it also performs a number of optimisations to the content it serves up. It does on-the-fly compaction of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, stripping out the extra whitespace that can pad.

20-30 per cent to the files and also performs optimisation of compressed PNG and JPEG images. According to Google, the Page Speed Service speeds up sites to the extent of between 25 to 60 per cent.

The service would also be easy to get up and going, as it does not require anything other than signing up and modifying DNS entries to refer to Google's servers.

Not all sites would be eligible, however, and configurations using ''bare'' DNS names, (no ''www'' in their web addresses), SSL or various other complex features cannot use Page Speed Service. 

The company also offers an Apache plugin for performing many of the same optimisations within the web server itself.