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Some pages from Forsta Plus can become very large, and with the built-in compression support found in most browsers, content delivery time could potentially be reduced with a fair amount of IIS compression is enabled for IIS. Compressed pages are transferred faster to the client browser requesting the page, and also reduce the bandwidth requirement for transmission of the same amount of content. Compressed pages are automatically decompressed on the client so the process is transparent to the end-user. If the browser does not support compression the server will send pages uncompressed, so the only backside for this is a slight performance overhead on the server for handling the compression.
By default, IIS 7 compression is only enabled for static content, not for dynamic content. Dynamic content compression needs to be enabled in the server role configuration before it can be set in the IIS administration console.
Figure 1 - Compression settings for servers
Figure 2 - Compression settings for web site
IIS supports many additional compression settings that are not visible in the GUI, these can be set using the appcmd tool or by editing the applicationHost.config file found in the c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\config\ folder.
Most options are documented in the IIS.Net config reference, found at: http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference.
Warning
Forsta strongly recommends that you perform a back-up of the existing configuration before making any changes.
For example, the following excerpts from the applicationHost.config file on Forsta’s servers have been shown to work quite well with compression. More detail is available at:
http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/system.webServer
In the <system.webserver> section, add the following:
<httpCompression directory="%SystemDrive%\inetpub\temp\IIS Temporary Compressed Files" minFileSizeForComp="256">
__<scheme name="gzip" dll="%Windir%\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll" />
____<staticTypes>
______<add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" />
______<add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" />
______<add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" />
______<add mimeType="application/x-javascript charset=utf-8" enabled="true" />
______<add mimeType="application/atom+xml" enabled="true" />
______<add mimeType="application/xaml+xml" enabled="true" />
______<add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" />
____</staticTypes>
____<dynamicTypes>
______<add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" />
______<add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" />
______<add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" />
______<add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" />
__</dynamicTypes>
</httpCompression>