IIS Dynamic Content Compression is off by default, has anyone turned on

[RichCPT]

I was noticing the AA IIS response received from a server running under IIS was much larger than the response from the traditional AA WAS. In IIS version 10, Microsoft put a couple of things in to allow compression of dynamic content, which is something we had under traditional WAS by turning on "Enable gzip" under the "Performance" tab.

Microsoft has left their gzip compression turned off, by default.

Has anyone turned it on for Alpha under IIS ver 10 and what are the recommended configuration settings - threshold settings, MIME types, etc.?

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/fri...res-in-iis-10/

[jgrannis]

Re: IIS Dynamic Content Compression is off by default, has anyone turned on

We have IIS running on a Windows Server 2012 R2 and have added and turned on dynamic content compression.
I don't remember changing any of the default values.
I also don't remember indicating that any particular MIME type was dynamic. However, I believe that all content is considered dynamic unless explicitly added as static content in the server's (or at the default web site or site/folder level) Configuration Editor.

I seem to remember adding .db (application/x-sqlite3) to the static collection before setting the server up to do dynamic compression.

I can't think of any problems it has caused by turning on the dynamic compression. As the article that you referenced explained, at the time I did turn on Failed Request Tracing and set it to trace even the HTTP code 200 responses. I did see that everything was being compressed (almost everything) and it did seem to speed up some traffic, especially that which concerned json resources.
The one thing that I remember not seeing being compressed while looking through the trace information was text/html mimeTypes. I believe that I needed to change it from 'text/html' to 'text/html; charset=utf-8'.

[iRadiate]

Re: IIS Dynamic Content Compression is off by default, has anyone turned on

Jeff, when you say you noticed a speed up in traffic, do you mean client page loads were faster?
I'm also running on Windows Server 2012 R2 and don't have the dynamic content compression module installed.
Wondering if I should consider adding this server role and try it out to see if performance improves at all.

Rich, if you run dynamic compression I'd be interested to hear your feedback on it .. performance, settings, etc.

[jgrannis]

Re: IIS Dynamic Content Compression is off by default, has anyone turned on

I only really develop mobile apps then build them with PhoneGap Build so I don't see pages loads going any faster.

The next part is a bit long but it helps to show what was faster...

After a user logs in to our app, I create and download a sqlite database for each user. It is a bit of a complicated process because at the time we were building the app, we couldn't build the whole sqlite database with the user's data and then download it because we were getting timeout issues. I think the client (in our case, Android) would decide to timeout and not the server. After playing around with every single timeout property on both the client and server sides, I finally gave up. Later, I came to understand that for these sqlite .db files and for some json files, the app's webview/browser wasn't handling the request. Those requests for downloading the files are being managed by the lower level Dalvik virtual machine on Android (even on our Android 7.1.1 tablets). Anyway, it is Dalvik that times out and not the app. So we broke up the process where we create the sqlite database but only add 1 row of data to each table and download it. It may no longer be true but at the time if we tried to create an empty table on the server we would get an error. Also at the time, in order to set up indexes in the sqlite database, we had to initialize them in the server version of the sqlite db because we couldn't figure out how to add indexes via the sqlite plugin on the device. We get our database downloaded to the device, then run through quickly and delete the 1 row of junk data in each table. We then populate the tables with data from the server. Table by table. At the end, once the data has been populated, we create some views in the device's sqlite db. If you do nothing that involves the DOM needing to recalcute any redraws in the onSuccess events of sqlite actions, I believe that all of that can pretty much run in the background without interfering with the user so the user THINKS the app is loading faster.

All that to explain that once we turned on dynamic compression, our login process was 4 times faster. In Chrome's DevTools network tab, I could watch the download times for the server's responses go from quite a few seconds to a few hundred milliseconds in some cases.

For a5w pages and for speeding up smaller, individual page loads, I am wondering if dynamic compression would help that much. Especially where the IIS configuration might have some chunked transferring going on. I need to research it again but I think that the whole "page" needs to be finished being created before compression and only then can the response start to be delivered back to the client. That may be old news now though. Maybe the newer versions of IIS can chunk, compress the chunk, and deliver the chunk while preparing other chunks in the background.

[iRadiate]

Re: IIS Dynamic Content Compression is off by default, has anyone turned on

Thanks Jeff, wow that was a fascinating process you worked through with creating the mobile database on the fly like that. Kudos for even figuring that out.

As for the dynamic compression, I wonder if Terry at Alpha might be able to offer some insight. Perhaps I'll send him an email tomorrow.
I'm also wondering how pre-rendering of components fits in to this and whether pre-rendering components would see less benefit with dynamic compression versus non pre-rendered components.

It's all quite interesting and anything that potentially improves web app performance is worth investigating.

[RichCPT]

Re: IIS Dynamic Content Compression is off by default, has anyone turned on

So far, I have only turned on the IIS Dynamic Content Compression (DCC) for my local dev computer.

A Grid with about 30 rows along with an updateable detail view for it, with "Pre-fetch data for Detail View" turned on, returns 1MB when DCC is off.

When DCC is on, only 240KB is returned!

On a local dev computer that time difference is negligible. (But keep reading to see what else I found.)

This is a fairly small grid with very little data in it that the user actually sees. There are a lot of hidden fields that control the look of things and the row/column -based security that is applied to each row as it comes up in the Detail View. But there is no way I have 1Meg of data and controls.

Using Chrome Dev Tools I inspected the returned ajax response; it contained ~ 3600 lines of Javascript and data.

The last 2000 lines were nothing but SVG definitions in a Javascript array for a ton of icons (that I had know idea were even present in the Grid) with ID's beginning with "alpha-icon-".

In AA designer, I switched to the "xbasic" view of the whole component, searched for "alpha-icon-" and found out the new Transient message uses them.
I took out the Action Javascript that had my one-and-only Transient message in the component.

That shaved 700KB and 2000 lines off of the returned ajax response for opening that component.

: - )

This was under Alpha version 4.5.5.8 Build # 5581.

[peteconway]

Re: IIS Dynamic Content Compression is off by default, has anyone turned on

I took out the Action Javascript that had my one-and-only Transient message in the component.

That shaved 700KB and 2000 lines off of the returned ajax response for opening that component.

That's just crazy - won't be using that!