I’ve been having some issues with a hosting provider getting HTTP Compression set up correctly for ASP.NET pages in IIS. It’s not hard to set up, but you need to do it using command line tools, not the IIS Management Tool. Thus it’s probably not well-known, and possibly viewed as an unsupported hack by some hosting companies.

Believe me, when you’re working with a hosting provider, you don’t really want to do too much stuff that they don’t support. Otherwise, if anything goes wrong, they’ll say “well, of course you’re having problems, it’s probably because you’re doing that crazy unsupported stuff.”

So I was worried that I’d never get HTTP Compression running for this ASP.NET site, when today I ran across this HTTP Compression module from Ben Lowery that you can literally drop into your bin directory, add a few things to your web.config, and shazam! your ASP.NET pages are compressed. Now that’s frickin awesome. And it’s free & open source. And it seems to work.

So…if you have an ASP.NET site that you’d like to try compressing, and you either can’t or won’t configure compression in IIS, give Ben’s module a try. Note that compression uses up CPU, so if you’re using shared hosting, you should probably use the deflate algorithm on the low setting to minimize the CPU usage. And even that might be too much CPU utilization — you’ll have to see.

Also one thing I noticed … the high/medium/low compression settings only affect deflate, not gzip. :/

Edit: well, looks like it’s somehow corrupting the AJAX return calls in Anthem. Or, trimming out most of the JSON. Or something. Anyhow, the non-AJAX pages seems to work pretty well, but I’ll test it a bit further. I like how to can specify URLs & mime types to not compress, although the ability to provide a regex to skip compression on would be nice.