This is stuff that the elite may already be using, but I wanted to document it for my own knowledge. I was trying to speed up my websites, just because speed is good. I found a few things that I could do and I recently implemented them.
To speed up page creation, I turned on mysql's caching functionality. I use mysql to drive ultramookie.com and mindof.ultramookie.com, so making mysql faster would make the websites faster. I edited /etc/my.cnf (for RHEL and CentOS) and added:
query_cache_size=24M
query_cache_type=1
query_cache_limit=2M
show status like 'qc%';
mysql> show status like 'qc%';
+-------------------------+----------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+-------------------------+----------+
| Qcache_free_blocks | 2 |
| Qcache_free_memory | 19791488 |
| Qcache_hits | 237778 |
| Qcache_inserts | 6639 |
| Qcache_lowmem_prunes | 0 |
| Qcache_not_cached | 31 |
| Qcache_queries_in_cache | 4117 |
| Qcache_total_blocks | 8246 |
+-------------------------+----------+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ \
no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ \
no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html