Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results

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AbleMods
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Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results

Post by AbleMods » 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:
Capture.JPG
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 :)
Capture2.JPG
Joe Payne
AbleCommerce Custom Programming and Modules http://www.AbleMods.com/
AbleCommerce Hosting http://www.AbleModsHosting.com/
Precise Fishing and Hunting Time Tables http://www.Solunar.com

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compunerdy
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Re: Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results

Post by compunerdy » Mon Feb 06, 2012 1:31 pm

Without setting this up I got mine down to 1.07 by removing the outside picture load for the paypal payments image. The slowest thing now is the godaddy site seal load.

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Re: Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results

Post by AbleMods » Mon Feb 06, 2012 1:35 pm

Sweet. I just had another client this morning pull that GoDaddy seal as it was adding significant time to the page speed.
Joe Payne
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Re: Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results

Post by zanzor » Mon Feb 06, 2012 2:36 pm

Joe You ROCK!

Here are my results after i did what you just talked about!!

my sever (beside me)
is a quad core web server (8 gigs ram)
and a 12 core server amd db server. (16 gigs ram)
running off our 80/30 fiberoptic net..

test was ran on the dev site..
joe-rocks.jpg

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compunerdy
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Re: Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results

Post by compunerdy » Mon Feb 06, 2012 5:43 pm

Zanzor, you tested that from two different servers. First was from texas and second was from New York.. it may make a diff.

I fixed the godaddy seal and now I got 606ms, still looking into setting up the compression.

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Re: Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results

Post by AbleMods » Mon Feb 06, 2012 5:49 pm

IIS 7 compression setup is substantially different from IIS 6. Trying to find a clear set of steps for IIS 7, surprisingly hard to come by. Everyone has bits and pieces but not the whole enchilada.

Some things to note about IIS 7 and compression:

There are CPU limiters. Compression won't happen 100% of the time if those CPU limits aren't adjusted.
There are hit limiters. Compression won't happen (by default) unless the page is hit 2x in 10 seconds.
Dynamic disabled. Dynamic content pages are disabled by default.
MIME types. Now you reference MIME types in the config instead of file extensions.

That's all I know so far.
Joe Payne
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compunerdy
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Re: Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results

Post by compunerdy » Mon Feb 06, 2012 7:22 pm

I figured out how to turn it on or off for dynamic and static and I saw a lot of info on how to set things up using the web.config but I would imagine in IIS directly you should be able to tell it which file types to compress but in my short time of searching I never found it.

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Re: Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results

Post by AbleMods » Mon Feb 06, 2012 7:31 pm

Check the compression with the tools, don't just assume it's compressed because the checkboxes are set. Saw several posts about people making that assumption.

Yeah ideally for AbleCommerce 7 setting up everything in the web.config would great. I don't think IIS 6 can do it in the web.config. IIS 7 looks like it might but I haven't seen anything conclusive.
Joe Payne
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AbleCommerce Hosting http://www.AbleModsHosting.com/
Precise Fishing and Hunting Time Tables http://www.Solunar.com

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Re: Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results

Post by jmestep » Tue Feb 07, 2012 7:16 am

Joe, have you had any problem with loading images thru the admin? I had turned on compression on a site a long time ago and it caused a problem with that. I don't remember what IIS it was, though.
I added code to the web.config on a site to compress scripts a while ago, but I don't remember where I got it!
<modules>
<add name="ScriptModule" preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
<add name="AbleCommerceHttpModule" type="CommerceBuilder.Services.AbleCommerceHttpModule, CommerceBuilder.Services" preCondition="managedHandler" />
<!--w2m jme 111109 compress scripts-->
<add type="ScriptCompressorModule" name="ScriptCompressorModule" />
</modules>

<!--compress script resources w2m jme 111109-->
<add verb="*" path="*js.axd" type="ScriptCompressorHandler" />
</handlers>

The above code hooks into a ScriptCompressor.cs in the App_Code folder that compresses and caches for 30 days. I can't remember where I got the code, but it might have been from a Google search. I think this client has IIS6 and we also put some caching on folders like images.
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708-653-3100 x209
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http://www.web2market.com/Search-Report ... -P154.aspx

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Re: Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results

Post by AbleMods » Tue Feb 07, 2012 8:12 am

jmestep wrote:Joe, have you had any problem with loading images thru the admin? I had turned on compression on a site a long time ago and it caused a problem with that. I don't remember what IIS it was, though.
I just tested uploading some images to a few test products, worked great. Was that where you saw your issue?
Joe Payne
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AbleCommerce Hosting http://www.AbleModsHosting.com/
Precise Fishing and Hunting Time Tables http://www.Solunar.com

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Re: Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results

Post by zanzor » Sat Feb 11, 2012 11:48 am

@comp..
That was just the screen shot i had on file
They were both below 1 second. withing .100 of each other from tx & ny

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Re: Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results

Post by zanzor » Tue Apr 03, 2012 11:48 pm

Anyone tried and had good results from doing this to your server?

Parallelize downloads across hostnames

for what i get, you make a subdomain like http://image.mystore.com that you load images from and http://scripts.mystore.com to load up scripts from etc.. Sounds like the browser will be able to download more than one item at a time this way.. Just wondering if it would really make a difference in load times.. seeing as how i am already about like 1-2 secs now..

here is the details about it...

https://developers.google.com/speed/doc ... eDownloads

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Re: Page Load Speed, GZip and Compression Results

Post by ChipWV » Sun Mar 23, 2014 7:16 pm

I enabled GZip today and got some improvements, but seems my DB is the weakest link now. Will tackle that problem this week. Anyway, my Google feed did not insert tonight, anyone else have this problem after enabling GZip? Do I need to exclude the pages that create the feed?

Site is running AC 7.06

Thanks
Chip

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