Can you enable HTTP compression in IIS 6 without restarting IIS?

Question

Hello -

I'm currently optimizing the performance on my company's site; when it was taking 6-10 seconds to download 2MB+ of our homepage and assets (the site is mostly Flash with a lot of media, so it's not 2MB of HTML and viewstate). There are a lot of things that will need to be done to get this download size down; but one thing I definitely want to do is enable HTTP compression to compress our static content, specifically XML, CSS, and JS; I don't imagine compression will do much for the SWFs and JPGs.

I want to enable this on just our staging site so I can do some server testing and benchmarking. This means I'm going to have to do some Metabase editing, since IIS 6 doesn't allow you to set compression on an individual site via IIS manager. The problem with that is the Metabase is locked by IIS so I can't save; and even if I save the edits, I'm required to restart IIS for the changes to take affect; which will take down other live sites hosted on the same server. Is there anyway to enable compression for one site without restarting IIS? I don't mind restarting our staging site; I just don't want this work to take down other sites on the server.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You do realize an IISRESET can happen in literally a couple seconds, and it can be so quick that user requests will merely "hang" until the server responds.

The only bad part is that if they are using server sessions, those might get lost.

You should enable HTTP compression, it's generally a good thing, in today's servers you are rarely using any significant amount of CPU usage, so the minor task of compressing the HTTP output will save you more on bandwidth than you loose in CPU time.

I should also mention, whoever is creating your Flash files are doing it incorrectly, the flash developer needs to stream the flash components, not deliver every single graphic, sound & animation on the first page view. There's no reason any Flash front page should be more than 100k.

Answer 2

Do you have "Enable Direct Metabase Edit" checked? If so you should be able to edit the metabase and when the file is save IIS will automatically pickup most of changes.More details here

You can also enable compression using adsutil.vbs. There are examples here and in the comments of this blog post.

cscript C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs set w3svc/site#/root/DoStaticCompression False
cscript C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs set w3svc/site#/root/DoDynamicCompression False