Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results
Posted: Mon Feb 06, 2012 10:36 am
Introduction
I've been doing some digging into IIS compression settings lately and thought I'd share some experiences. Obviously your mileage may vary, but these are some real world numbers so you can give yourself some good discussion at the water cooler.....
The Setup
You'd be surprised how little technology-oomph it takes to run an AbleCommerce 7 storefront. So often we get wrapped up solving a problem by throwing a bigger engine at it. It's quicker no doubt. But not necessarily smarter. Let's use my http://www.Solunar.com site as an example:
* Over 20,000 products, another 10,000 variants
* Roughly 600 - 1,000 unique visitors a day (depends on the season)
* 4 years straight live with AbleCommerce 7. Quite a bit of history data involved.
Now let's take a look the hardware involved, brace yourself:
* HP Proliant DL360 G3. Yes, a G3. That's about 8 years old.
* Dual Xeon 3.06 Ghz processors, 2 cores each
* 4Gb RAM
* RAID-1 with 2 72Gb hot-plug hard drives
* dual power supplies
* Windows 2003 32-bit running IIS 6.0
* SQL 2005 Express installed locally
The Learning Never Ends
So back to my compression story. After a client of mine repeatedly nagged me about getting compression going, I decided to give it a look-see. My client's pretty technically saavy, so I figured he knew something about what he was talking about.
Sure enough, some quick checks at Google and Pingdom showed me compression would be a benefit. After a little workout in Google, I found the information I needed to get it going in IIS 6.0. Surprisingly simple to do once I found the right file. Even more surprising is how IIS has a GUI for enabling compression, but not WHAT is compressed. That's the part few people realize.
By default, IIS 6.0 compression only happens if the page is HTM or HTML. Worthless for all of us AbleCommerce owners who live and die by the ASPX file. And the CSS file. And the JS file. And the AXD file etc.
Once I enabled compression for the additional extensions involved in an ASP.Net website, I then returned to Pingdom for another scan. I was completely shocked by the results. Check them out here: So as you can see, taking the time to configure your IIS installation properly can have a dramatic impact on overall site performance. Remember, these improvements apply to EVERY SINGLE PAGE in your website. You can't find a much better bang-for-your-buck than enabling compression.
The Really Interesting Part
So you might say to yourself "Sure Joe, anyone can make ONE website load fast with that platform." Well, let's take a look at what ELSE I have on my one 8-year-old G3 server:
* AbleMods.com ( AbleCommerce 7.0.7 )
* FogBugz Case Management
* RDP (Terminal Services)
* FTP
* MDaemon Email Server
* MDaemon Email Antivirus
* MDaemon Web Mail Portal
* WebLog Expert (Log File Traffic Graphs)
* AbleCommerce 7 test install for client live off-site testing
Even with all that running, even with all those services processing requests all day long, I can get the http://www.Solunar.com home page load time down to less than 1.5 seconds!! Not bad, not bad at all
p.s. Just for bragging rights, here is what http://www.AbleMods.com did this morning (after compression). Yes, that's in milliseconds
I've been doing some digging into IIS compression settings lately and thought I'd share some experiences. Obviously your mileage may vary, but these are some real world numbers so you can give yourself some good discussion at the water cooler.....
The Setup
You'd be surprised how little technology-oomph it takes to run an AbleCommerce 7 storefront. So often we get wrapped up solving a problem by throwing a bigger engine at it. It's quicker no doubt. But not necessarily smarter. Let's use my http://www.Solunar.com site as an example:
* Over 20,000 products, another 10,000 variants
* Roughly 600 - 1,000 unique visitors a day (depends on the season)
* 4 years straight live with AbleCommerce 7. Quite a bit of history data involved.
Now let's take a look the hardware involved, brace yourself:
* HP Proliant DL360 G3. Yes, a G3. That's about 8 years old.
* Dual Xeon 3.06 Ghz processors, 2 cores each
* 4Gb RAM
* RAID-1 with 2 72Gb hot-plug hard drives
* dual power supplies
* Windows 2003 32-bit running IIS 6.0
* SQL 2005 Express installed locally
The Learning Never Ends
So back to my compression story. After a client of mine repeatedly nagged me about getting compression going, I decided to give it a look-see. My client's pretty technically saavy, so I figured he knew something about what he was talking about.
Sure enough, some quick checks at Google and Pingdom showed me compression would be a benefit. After a little workout in Google, I found the information I needed to get it going in IIS 6.0. Surprisingly simple to do once I found the right file. Even more surprising is how IIS has a GUI for enabling compression, but not WHAT is compressed. That's the part few people realize.
By default, IIS 6.0 compression only happens if the page is HTM or HTML. Worthless for all of us AbleCommerce owners who live and die by the ASPX file. And the CSS file. And the JS file. And the AXD file etc.
Once I enabled compression for the additional extensions involved in an ASP.Net website, I then returned to Pingdom for another scan. I was completely shocked by the results. Check them out here: So as you can see, taking the time to configure your IIS installation properly can have a dramatic impact on overall site performance. Remember, these improvements apply to EVERY SINGLE PAGE in your website. You can't find a much better bang-for-your-buck than enabling compression.
The Really Interesting Part
So you might say to yourself "Sure Joe, anyone can make ONE website load fast with that platform." Well, let's take a look at what ELSE I have on my one 8-year-old G3 server:
* AbleMods.com ( AbleCommerce 7.0.7 )
* FogBugz Case Management
* RDP (Terminal Services)
* FTP
* MDaemon Email Server
* MDaemon Email Antivirus
* MDaemon Web Mail Portal
* WebLog Expert (Log File Traffic Graphs)
* AbleCommerce 7 test install for client live off-site testing
Even with all that running, even with all those services processing requests all day long, I can get the http://www.Solunar.com home page load time down to less than 1.5 seconds!! Not bad, not bad at all
p.s. Just for bragging rights, here is what http://www.AbleMods.com did this morning (after compression). Yes, that's in milliseconds