Applying GZIP for a website under IIS?

Question

How to find out whether particular web server's GZip is enabled or not and How to apply the GZip compression for the web site under IIS 6.0?

Answer 1

You can use Fiddler2 to inspect the HTTP traffic and verify it's GZip compressed. To enable compression in IIS 7.0 or 7.5, you can use the IIS manager's compression module and by simply checking the appropriate checkboxes. Of course, you need to have HTTP Static/Dynamic Compression installed in Windows Features:

Answer 2

The IIS GUI doesn't support turning compression on in IIS6. You'll need to update the IIS metabase directly with the settings instead.

The MSDN documentation gives a high level overview of HTTP compression but doesn't talk about getting the changes into the metabase. I found some instructions and a helpful metabase example.