http compression when download assemblies from IIS

Is there any way to use http 1.1 compresion for the exe and dll asemblies hosted on IIS? I hope this will increase first download performance.

[142 byte] By [codefund.com] at [2008-3-5]

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# 1

No. Fusion (the download manager for managed components) uses URLMON, IE's moniker-based interface for URL resolution. It hooks into URLMON by installing its own MIME filter for application/octet-stream. Since HTTP compression is also implemented as a MIME filter (for gzip and deflate), you can't get both behaviors at once - only one MIME filter will ever get executed.

You wouldn't get much benefit here anyway, IMO. .NET assemblies are pretty lightweight size-wise since most of the functionality rests in the Framework. I'll bet you waste more of your time in HTTP request/response overhead than in pure download size. The best you can do to improve this is to make sure the clients are configured to use HTTP/1.1, which will use persistent connections.

Do a Network Monitor (netmon) trace, or look in your server logs, and see what's actually happening here. Your app may be suffering from one of the known perf issues caused by Fusion. Issues are:

* Fusion double-binding. Fusion starts by using a LoadFrom() call, then turns it into a Load() if the assembly resides in the current appBase.
* Fusion probing for the main assembly.
* The Framework probing for satellite assemblies.

<a href="http://support.microsoft.com/?id=814668">This KB article</a> tells you how to use a .config file to work around these issues.

HTH,

-J-

codefund.com at 2007-9-8 >

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# 2

With regards to download performance, you may also want to check out the MSDN article by Chris Sells <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/02/07/NetSmartClients/default.aspx">Security and Versioning Models in the Windows Forms Engine Help You Create and Deploy Smart Clients</a>. In the section entitled <b>Related Files</b> he talks about the number of HTTP requests made for files, the reason and techniques to reduce this number. In his example, downloading the initial version of his EXE resulted in 35 HTTP requests for files.

codefund.com at 2007-9-8 >

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