Some questions about W3 Total Cache Settings & Functionality

@frederick Townes : I thought you asked us to put questions at http://www.w3-edge.com/contact/ instead of the forum here, but I see your activity here (moreover I haven’t received a reply from you to all the emails I sent – – 2 or 3).

Anyway, I have a few doubts regarding the plugin’s settings and functionality:

1. These are my settings pages, do they look good?

– General: http://bit.ly/ojXwk3
– Page Cache: http://bit.ly/r4Kvmj

– Minify: (a) As for Minify settings, I haven’t enabled HTML minification, fearing that it could cause issues with Google Analytics and Google Ads. Is this true / possible?

(b) Also most popular websites using the plugin haven’t enabled HTML minification, and even JS / CSS Minification sometimes. Can you please clarify this: what are the possible ill-effects of HTML, JS, CSS minification? (I really googled that stuff, and couldn’t get proper answers.)

– Database Cache: http://bit.ly/n9MNm2
– Object Cache: http://bit.ly/pfezfS

– Browser Cache: (a) Please take a look: http://bit.ly/qbqAcx

(b) I see that these are the most-frequently used settings for Object Cache: cache with max-age ("max-age=EXPIRES_SECONDS, public, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate") and cache ("public") and I’ve got some understanding about them, so please correct me if I am wrong.

=> cache ("public") – – allows the browser to download resources from the cdn rather than from the origin server itself. So, this should be enabled when CDN is being used.

=> cache with max-age ("max-age=EXPIRES_SECONDS, public, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate") – – I’ve no idea, please clarify.

– User Agent Groups: (a) Since I’ve disabled W3 Total Cache’s functionality for my mobile site, I use just one group of mobile user agents. That’s okay, right?

(b) And are you sure that every ., - and <space> should be escaped (added in the front) with a \ ?? Just confirming. And does this apply to any plugin that asks for a list of user agents (like mobile theme plugins)??

– Content Delivery Network: (a) I am planning to use Softlayer’s Internap as they have a wonderful feature – – POP Pull, wherein I get FTP access, and when I upload a file, it’s instantly cached/copied across all the POPs / edge locations. Which means there will be no latency even for the first visitor from a region.

Anyway, the question is: as per my requirements I chose “Self-hosted / File Transfer Protocol Upload” option for CDN. Now will the images I upload to posts be stored in both the usual location (/wp-content/uploads/) and the FTP server, or just the FTP server alone?

If the answer is, just the FTP server alone, is there a way to make it store the images and stuff I upload to posts in both locations?

(b) In your opinion, is Internap (resold by Softlayer as “Cloudlayer CDN”) good?

(c) lastly, do these settings look okay? http://bit.ly/pitHfl

(FYI, I am still using 0.9.2.3, seeing people report some issues with 0.9.2.4)

Please be as much clear as possible. Many may have these doubts as well. Thanks.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/