[thelist] IIS Compression

barry sweeney barry at springcottage.ndirect.co.uk
Tue Jul 29 08:58:36 CDT 2003


Hello Evolters,

I look after a site which appears to be generating a lot of network traffic
(I say "appears" because I'm in dispute with the ISP about how much of that
traffic is mine, but that's for another question).  The site is hosted on a
Windows 2000 server and in an attempt to keep the bandwidth costs down I
tried to use IIS compression yesterday.  However, the site is a forum, and
so the content is dynamic.

Once we turned compression on, I kept having to refresh the page, and so did
everyone else, which suggests that the pages were being cached.  The website
logs for yesterday show a *massive* increase in download activity (up from
48MB to 620MB, presumably from refeshing), so I've now switched compression
off for "Application Pages".  Everything seems back to normal.

It's entirely possible that I missed some setting that would allow
compression for active server pages and not cache them (or cache them for a
minute or two), but I didn't see it.  Anyone know where it might be, if it
exists at all?

Taking this forward, I read up a little on compression and get the feeling
that maybe the built in IIS compression could be improved upon.  There are
several third party solutions and, naturally, they all claim the same sort
of results, but they differ quite a lot in price.  Does anyone on the list
have any real experience of:

www.turboiis.com or
www.xcompress.com/home/default.asp?c=54&p=522 or
www.httpzip.com or
www.pipeboost.com or
something else

and could share some advice before I commit some money.

Yours in hope,

Barry




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