Hi all, Just the other day I was working at a client's site, and well, the site was not going so fast. So I decided to look into the following concepts to speed up MWP, running Access as the db.

Stats: 1ghz p3, 256mb ram, ide hdd's

• IIS Compression[/*]
• Caching the images and avatars[/*]

Step 1: Compressed data save bandwidth and gets to you faster.
This increased my speed on my intranet app by 30%
I went into IIS, and set the compression, and the temp space I was to allow the server to use at 32mb, roughly 1/8th the total ram on the box. I also reg edit'd HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SYSTEM \CurrentControlSet \Services \Inetinfo \Parameters\ MemCacheSize (REG_DWORD) because it is usually set too high. You will probably see 19 or 25, this is ram consumption as I am told, for idle processes. I set it to 8.

To turn on compression for static files go to IIS, right click on your server, go to Properties, click Edit next to the dropdown saying wwwservice, from there select the service tab. Select compress static and apps, and set the radio button to allow 32mb for the max temp folder size.

Now this will compress static items, not the asp, now should you have other content or are foolhearty enough to compress ASP (I am) get a command prompt and do the following:

CD into c:\inetpub\adminscripts
Type:cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3Svc/Filters/Compression/GZIP/HcFileExtensions "htm" "html adding "asp" "asa" "gif" "jpg" "swf" "css" "js" or whatever you want to compress. You will probably see some cryptic error, but ignore it. DO NOT TYPE IN MDB, you will have long! lag times, leave the db alone.
Type in next: cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3Svc/Filters/Compression/DEFLATE/HcFileExtensions followed by the extensions you chose to compress. If not, you will get weird garbled text.

Finally type: iissreset.exe /restart that will stop and start IIS with the new policy in effect.

The overall savings in bandwidth is about 15-30% on a default install of MWP and about 30% on Comersus.
Uncompressed 530k and 5 seconds, after 70k and 2 seconds

Step 2, CACHING:

I went to Port80 Software and dropped $150 for a simple caching software, ignore Xcache and Spidercache, they are too expensive ($1500) and caused troubles in demo mode. I set it to cache all the images in the site, and set it's ram allocation to 4mb, which is pretty generous for the total size of all the gifs, jpgs, and static content in MWP. You can run a free demo for 30 days to test it yourself, along with Xcompress courtesy xcache, but that is $400 per server, so the first step in this topic iis compression is free and somewhat effective.


The site has roughly as much info as MWP, and is an intranet app, so a public demo is not available at this time. I did do all my other tests on fillmsupplies.com, but no traffic, so who knows if it worked? besides that box was whacked by spidercache, so it has issues.

Hope this helps somebody out, and I am not talking out of my behind, because it did infact work for me.


Tim Hunold
Test Shoot
Film Supplies
ItsSoBig.com (my web stuff)
Group Buy city

Gotta like the TS.com site, very nice! Great post as well. Welcome to WDF! FYI, I edited your post to fix the red parts.

That's not your girlfriend, that's my future ex-wife!

That's one heck of a post. But I do have a very stupid question: what about caching your ASP output itself? Like adding the appropriate Response headers when a page is first executed, etc., and so on? Did you try that and/or does it apply?

Thanks guys, it is poorly documented, and has big gains, because if you transfer loads of data, you are saving $ on bandwidth. Nobody told me about it, and it is not in any manuals, so I figured when I got it right, I would share.

As far as caching, well, I have looked at caching solutions, some uncompress the data.

Netzero, AOL, and my own Surfside.net use Turbosquid (apache based) with gzip to cache and compress data, some of you may know this as reverse proxy compression. Since cache=proxy in that case.

You can do both, but it is expensive for most users. In the $3k range.

I strongly suggest you take a look at www.xcache.com they make great products, if you can afford them.

As far as iis5.1 compliance it is just fine to run these scripts. If you take care of your server, you will be fine, sometimes, poor iis configuration with botched hack attempts can corrupt iis compression, so just switch it off at that point.

Kalani is mine she is 20, I am 30! woo-hoo!!! Nice when your first bride is a trophy bride. You can have my left overs if we break up.

bump-a-bump-bump-bump

Hey gang, it has been a loooong time since this was posted, but I am curious how the new compression system is working for you guys/gals.