IIS compression

Question

Can anyone tell me the use of IIS/HTTP comression in .net web applications. I have iis 6.0 installed in my system.How do i activate compression.

Is it really helps to betetr the performance in real time?

My web page is very slow and one analyzing tool(web page ANlyzer) says to files are not compressed. Please advise.

Answer 1

I was tempted to say "belongs on serverfault", but from a development/design/architecture point of view there are some things to know here.

• yes, http compression can make a big difference to performance if bandwidth (size) is the issue, especially if you are talking to non-local clients - and is worth including in most web applications
• if your pages are slow because of how the processing at the server works, it won't make any difference at all... it only improves the server -> client measure
• to enable it, see google - or MSDN
• it requires a client (browser) that accepts compression (although this is negotiated in the http headers, so it should "fail safe" for old clients)
• but you need to watch out; if you still support IE 5?6?, there are a number of major bugs here (especially with ajax etc) - test on the clients you expect to see
• use Fiddler to check that it is working (as a developer, Fiddler should be one of your closest friends...)