[thelist] IIS Compression

[Morgan Kelsey]

barry,

> 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).

is this box colocated? the colo should be able to generate reports per
machine....mine even gave me a link to java applet that displays realtime
bandwidth usage on my machine. if they have a halfway decent router, they
should be able to show you stats on your port only.


> 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,

[...snip...]

> It's entirely possible that I missed some setting that would allow
> compression for active server pages and not cache them


nope, it's not you, the problem is IIS compression....it just don't work
right.


> 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

i use xcompress on my server, the results are really impressive.
earlier versions had some issues with CFMX and cookies, but they seem to
have been resolved in the newest release.

i think it's around $800 -- i've shaved $200/a month off my bandwidth bill
with it, not to mention that it speeds up the visitor's experience as well.

the only thing i don't like is the one-machine install locks onto the
machine name, so you can't rename your machine and keep your license
(tolerable, but annoying)

from my research i remember pipeboost having more features, but for a
text-rich forum you probably won't need them (or want them).


hth,

nagrom
http://morgankelsey.com