InstantASP Community Forums / Old Forums / InstantForum.NET 4.x / Suggestions & Requests / Diminishing the File Size of Forum Pages / Latest Posts

RE: Diminishing the File Size of Forum Pages

Drew Black — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 23:16:00 GMT

If you're going to use XCompress be sure to disable the IF compression and whitespace features. No sense adding the overhead of compressing twice.

RE: Diminishing the File Size of Forum Pages

Drew Black — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 22:49:27 GMT

The compression built into IIS6 is OK but cumbersome to manage. IIS5 compression is useless and basically didn't work for anything but static files. (no asp, aspx, php, etc.)

I use Xcompress on IIS6 simply because I used it on my old IIS5 server. Now I've got lots of pages in various sites that use the XCompress COM interface for various functions so upgrading was a no-brainer for me. It was cheaper to stick with xcompress then re-write those pages.

RE: Diminishing the File Size of Forum Pages

JBak — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 21:59:13 GMT

Why use XCompress when IIS6.0 and ever 5.0 ships with compression built in? It works just as well, and costs nothing to deploy.

RE: Diminishing the File Size of Forum Pages

Drew Black — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 11:15:20 GMT

I've tested the IF compression vs. XCompress for IIS version 3.0. Yes IF does do compression but only appears to save about 30% - 40% of the page size. That's pretty good but XCompress is very impressive.

Just one note, if you do try XCompress be sure to disable compression for the captchaimage.aspx page. If compression is enabled on this page the random character string doesn't appear.

RE: Diminishing the File Size of Forum Pages

AL (aholics.com) — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 11:08:26 GMT

I thought IF had a compression feature built-in? Haven't messed with it much, though. i.e. Look at the bottom of the pages here:

Anyway, compression isn't going to happen without more processing...no real way around that.

RE: Diminishing the File Size of Forum Pages

eschlange — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 10:38:59 GMT

At this point, I'm trying to use less CPU... :-)

http://support.instantasp.co.uk/Topic10180-59-1.aspx#bm10216

But if I can figure out how to reduce CPU usage, perhaps I'll look into XCompress.

_eric

RE: Diminishing the File Size of Forum Pages

Drew Black — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 22:00:05 GMT

I'd like to second this request. Many of the ID= tags that are generated by the .NET controls are huge strings. Is there any way to shrink them?

Also, eschlange, you may want to looking XCompress if you have your own dedicated server and a little processor time to spare. I run it on my Win2003 web server and it's worth its weight in gold, IMO. It's kept us from needing to expand our bandwidth. It will take a 500k forum page in InstantForum and compress it down to 37k on the fly for most modern browsers. Your site will appear many times faster to your users.

Diminishing the File Size of Forum Pages

eschlange — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 21:42:50 GMT

I'd like to see the file size of the forum's HTML pages shrunk quite a bit.

On my site, for example, here are some page sizes:
Topic details page, with 16 replies: 171kb
Forum page with list of perhaps 20 topics: 87kb
Home page: 78kb

I was raised like a good little web developer to always try to keep your page weight under 30kb. Perhaps that's a bit extreme, but it's good to have rules, because then you have to justify breaking them. It's important to remember that there are still a lot of dialup folks out there... having to wait 171kb/4kb/sec=42 seconds to load a page seems a bit extreme.

Thoughts?

_eric