I work on a product called Agility CMS. Agility CMS is a hosted web content management
system - including a web application dedicated to actually editing website
content, pages, sitemaps and other good stuff.
Last week we updated the app moved the whole system to IIS 7 on Windows
Server 2008. We also turned on dynamic compression - which will now work
properly on this system since we can now easily limit dynamic compression based
on mime-type (not just file extension). Meaning all of our attachment handlers
don't get messed up when delivering zips or other compressed files to silly
browsers like IE7.
Dynamic Compression in IIS 7 is dead simple - its available through the IIS
Admin, as you might expect.
But, behind the scenes, the dynamic content compression setting just tweaks a
setting in the system.webServer section of the web.config:
Cool. Just make sure that you have Dynamic Compression installed...
What does it mean though? How much real benefit is there to dynamic
compression in an AJAX style application?
In my preliminary tests (using Fiddler and FireBug) I was able see close to a
40% decrease in bandwidth overall.
The human result is a much more reactive experience on the application, which
is suddenly much snappier. I can tell that people are being WAY more
productive, too; my SQL server has jumped from an average 5-6% CPU usage to
closer to 8-10%. I guess that's a good thing...
I shouldn't have been so surprised at this remarkable change in the overall
bandwidth of the app, because we use dynamic compression with IIS 6 on our
regular websites, but we never seen any thing close to a 40% bandwidth
decrease. I am guessing this is because a regular website relies more on
pre-compressed stuff like JPEG and PNG files, as opposed to tons of web forms
with copious amount of HTML being sent back and forth to the server as part of
the basic CMS operations.
I can't wait to see our hosting bill at the end of the month - I'm hoping to
be pleasantly surprised once again!
More later - joel