How to Improve Web Application Performance by Enabling Dynamic Compression for JSON and JavaScript

Introduction

We try to boost our website performance by doing several things like caching, bundling, minification and Image Sprites, etc. But we forget to do configuration for dynamic compression for our AJAX requests. Let’s see how we can achieve it.

To demonstrate it, I am using IIS 7.5. In IIS 7, you need to enable Dynamic compression. I am not going in that way.

IIS Configuration

Let’s open IIS7.5 and select server name. Then you will see Configuration Editor in right side pane. Click to open it.

Once Configuration editor opens, select the section as ‘system.webServer’ --> httpCompression by expanding tree.

After selecting, just open dynamicTypes as shown in screenshot.

Now you can see collection editor for dynamic compression. By default, you can see compression for text, message and JavaScript. If you don’t see, just add as we will do for JSON. Click ‘Add’ and enter given value application/json.

Same add application/json; charset=utf-8.

Now close window and click Apply right hand side as follows:

Reset IIS and test your app, see how much time dynamic compression can save for you. Time can be seen for Ajax request in chrome developer tool or Fiddler.

If you click on request, you can see compression as gzip.

Summary

In this tip, we saw how we can configure dynamic compression on IIS. It will improve performance for your HTTP calls.

Happy coding!!