George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School

Speed Up Site Performance

Set HTTP Cache Headers

<VirtualHost *:80>
# Your config...
ExpiresActive On
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|gif|jpe?g|png|js|css)$">
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
Header unset ETag
FileETag None
Header unset Last-Modified
</FilesMatch>
</VirtualHost>

Gzip Web Server Output

<VirtualHost *:80>
# Your config...
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/javascript text/css application/x-javascript
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \\bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
</VirtualHost>

Source: Faster Sites Done Faster

Further reading: Using a far future expires header

Change Server Upload Permissions

  1. Enter ssh username@mason.gmu.edu replacing username appropriately.
  2. Enter your mason.gmu.edu password
  3. mason> pico .cshrc
  4. edit to reads umask 022 or umask 002 (If other people in your group edit the website, change your umask to 002; If only you edit your website, change it to 022)
  5. Save the file (Ctrl+O) (letter O)
  6. File Name to write: .cshrc will display towards the bottom of the window. Hit enter.
  7. Exit the file (Ctrl+X).
  8. Run pico .profile and pico .login and repeat Steps 3 and 4.
  9. Log out and then log back in again.

Source: Fix Server Upload Permissions