[update] It turns out there is an issue with this mod...Gallery thumbnails are not being displayed.  Only thumbnails are affected, everything else in the Gallery applications displays fine.  I'll have a fix posted shortly. [/update]

I posted earlier about enabling IIS compression to get some great performance benefits from your Community Server site.  Of course not everyone has this option, especially folks who cohost their CS sites.  So I set out to either A) write a CSModule that compresses content, B) write an HttpModule that compresses content or C) find a pre-built library that already does this.  C turned out to be the easiest option as it turns out the good folks over IC#Code have already done this.

First off you'll need to download the source code and samples.  In that archive you'll see a folder called HttpCompressionModule.  If you have Visual Studio you can compile it yourself, if not I've attached a pre-built binary to this post that you can use (NOTE: there is a dependancy on SharpZipLib.dll as well...it's already pre-built in the download archive, but I'm attaching it to this post as well).  Just drop them in your /bin folder and then merge the attached web.config file into your CS web.config and you'll be good to go.

The library supports both gzip and deflate compression, which all major browsers support...deflate uses less server resources, but gzip gets about a 5% compression benefit over deflate (albeit at more resource usage).  I noticed about the same page size decrease on my site as enabling IIS compression, i.e. my main blog page went from around 70kb to under 15kb, which is pretty substantial and leads to much faster pageload times.

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Posted Thu, May 18 2006 6:42 PM by Jayson Knight