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Comment by dclaw | Hacker News Reader

Pagespeed is absolutely one of the worst plugins in the world. mod_pagespeed for apache is garbage, and permanently breaks some websites when removed. I see no reason why the nginx version would be any better.

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I'm sorry it didn't work out! Permanently breaking a website when removed is very surprising, since if you uninstall the module it's not there anymore to have an effect. Would you be up for explaining more?

(I work on mod_pagespeed, and if we're breaking sites on removal that's something I want to look into.)

This kind of answer from Jeff (and other people) from the MPS team is in part what made me enjoy using MPS. Should you have any issue with MPS, if you send an email to the mailing list, you will always receive a kind answer, even in those cases were it is obvious you didn't read the doc.

I "worked" for months with Jeff and his team to find a real tricky bug to catch (well, they mostly did the work, I sent the bug reports) and they went above and beyond to find and fix that bug. (Remember the #1048 issue?)

I definitely recommend MPS, it will not "break your website".

I agree, Jeff and Otto have an amazing ethic and truly care for the project. I wish more project are lucky to have such leadership. Otto is no even with Google but has spent endless hours trying to help me and never tried to pitch consulting services although it seems that this is his business.

I have been using it for years on a very high traffic website and it works great. Doesn't break a thing for me. The image optimizations it does are awesome.

He said it breaks pages when removed. I'm guessing he means it's broken from SEO perspective.

Yes, it adds predictable hashes to the URL to help with automatic cache busting; you can easily create a simple Nginx configuration to normalize. As @jdmarantz said above, the latest version adds canonical URL headers to solve this issue without rewrites.

>permanently breaks some websites when removed

Elaborate?

MPS has been an absolute world saver for years for us (until we recently moved to an angular app, which ended up reducing the need to use MPS).

I'm very curious about what could have made your experience that bad. Mind elaborating?

side note: I never used the ngx plugin, for good reasons: it's never been a real priority for the MPS team who seems to be focusing on the Apache version.

PageSpeed has been a savior for me! Every powerful tool when misconfigured can do some harm.

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