Making the most out of IIS compression - Part 1: configuring IIS 7 compression

Introduction

Using compression is the single most effective way to reduce page load times. The .aspx files sent by the server to the browser consist of HTML. HTML is highly compressible by algorithms such as gzip. Because of this, modern web servers including IIS 5 and later have the ability to compress outgoing files, and modern browsers have the ability to decompress incoming files.

Both IIS 6 and IIS 7 offer advanced compression related options that help you get better performance improvements for your web site and make better use of your servers and bandwidth. Unfortunately, these options are not always easy to access. This article series shows step by step how to unlock these options.

In the first article in this 2 part series, we'll focus on configuring IIS 7 compression. If you are used to IIS 6, you'll find that IIS 7 offers many new features, including the ability to cache not only compressed static files, but also compressed dynamic files. If you still use IIS 6, the next article in the series will show how to configure IIS 6 compression.

Contents

• Request and response headers involved in compression
• Starting configuration of IIS 7 compression
• Installing the dynamic content compression module
• Enabling compression
• Setting compression by site, folder, or file
• Compression level
• Disabling compression based on CPU usage
• Setting the request frequency threshold for static compression
• Caching compressed dynamic files
• Improving the compressibility of your pages
• Summary

Request and response headers involved in compression

How does the server know that the browser can accept compressed content? And how does the browser know that the content it received is compressed?

When a browser that supports compression sends a request to the server, it includes the request header Accept-Encoding telling the server which compression algorithms it supports. For example:

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

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