Built-in GZip/Deflate Compression on IIS 7.x

IIS 7 improves internal compression functionality dramatically making it much easier than previous versions to take advantage of compression that’s built-in to the Web server. IIS 7 also supports dynamic compression which allows automatic compression of content created in your own applications (ASP.NET or otherwise!). The scheme is based on content-type sniffing and so it works with any kind of Web application framework.

While static compression on IIS 7 is super easy to set up and turned on by default for most text content (text/*, which includes HTML and CSS, as well as for JavaScript, Atom, XAML, XML), setting up dynamic compression is a bit more involved, mostly because the various default compression settings are set in multiple places down the IIS –> ASP.NET hierarchy.

Let’s take a look at each of the two approaches available:

Static Compression 

Compresses static content from the hard disk. IIS can cache this content by compressing the file once and storing the compressed file on disk and serving the compressed alias whenever static content is requested and it hasn’t changed. The overhead for this is minimal and should be aggressively enabled. 

Dynamic Compression 

Works against application generated output from applications like your ASP.NET apps. Unlike static content, dynamic content must be compressed every time a page that requests it regenerates its content. As such dynamic compression has a much bigger impact than static caching. 

How Compression is configured

Compression in IIS 7.x  is configured with two .config file elements in the <system.WebServer> space. The elements can be set anywhere in the IIS/ASP.NET configuration pipeline all the way from ApplicationHost.config down to the local web.config file. The following is from the the default setting in ApplicationHost.config (in the %windir%\System32\inetsrv\config forlder) on IIS 7.5 with a couple of small adjustments (added json output and enabled dynamic compression):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<configuration>

  <system.webServer>

    

    <httpCompression directory="%SystemDrive%\inetpub\temp\IIS Temporary Compressed Files">

      <scheme name="gzip" dll="%Windir%\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll" staticCompressionLevel="9" />

      <dynamicTypes>

        <add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" />

        <add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" />

        <add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" />

        <add mimeType="application/json" enabled="true" />

        <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" />

      </dynamicTypes>

      <staticTypes>

        <add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" />

        <add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" />

        <add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" />

        <add mimeType="application/atom+xml" enabled="true" />

        <add mimeType="application/xaml+xml" enabled="true" />

        <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" />

      </staticTypes>

    </httpCompression>

Read more: Rick Strahl

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